Chinese Birthday Customs

1. In the old days, birthdays of the elderly were more carefully divided. If it is a respected parent in the extended family birthday will also have a corresponding celebration, known as birthday celebration. Traditional birthdays are generally calculated according to the age.

2. The birthdays of Chinese emperors (or monarchs) through the ages are even more important. The birthdays of the Jin Dynasty monarchs include the following: Tianqing Festival, Wanshou Festival, Tianshou Festival, and Birthday. In the Qing Dynasty, whenever you meet the emperor's birthday, enthronement and other celebrations, there is an additional section of the examination, called Enke. If the main section and the Enke are held together, it is called "Enzheng and Ke". Guangxu thirty years a Chen (1904) is the Empress Dowager Cixi seventy birthday, then called the "longevity festival"

3, long tail: classical Chinese folk slang usage, used to refer to small children or not yet married young people's birthdays. Both the north and the south have this expression, usually refers to the elders to the younger generation said birthday. At the age of 16, adulthood, is the most important birthday, after that parents will say every year to grow a tail.

Expanded Information

Chinese birthdays are divided into weekly and imaginary years

The ancient Chinese did not have the modern concept of "birthday", and the closest word to the meaning of "birthday" is "birth" or "birth". The closest word to the meaning of "birthday" is "birth" or "birthdate". The concept of birth and birthdays are not exactly the same as birthdays. Birthdays are the smallest unit of days, while births and birthdays are the smallest unit of hours (moments). The ancients divided the day into twelve hours, which were represented by twelve branches of the earth's branches and were called the twelve hours of the day.

In the ancient Chinese concept of birth, the date is only an element of the record of the birth time, and the year, month and hour are side by side, and does not have any focus; and the Western concept of birthday, emphasizing the month and date, so that the birthday, only say a few days of the month, do not say the year nor the specific moment. This is another aspect of why the ancient Chinese did not emphasize the day of birth.

The imaginary year is a traditional Chinese way of counting age, also popular in other countries in eastern Asia, used to calculate the order of years (ordinal number) that a person is experiencing after birth, with the year just after birth as the first year, because it is the first year of a person's life, and has nothing to do with the time of the pregnancy that has already been experienced.

It is different from the internationally recognized method of calculating the length of time that a person has spent since birth (as a base number, it can also be calculated as an ending number, for example, three years and two months, seven and a half years, and so on) by taking the time of birth as the age of zero. In China, the two names are used to distinguish between the two methods of counting age, which is why there is a difference in the names of the two types of age.

Baidu Encyclopedia - Birthdays