Is the lunar calendar a solar calendar or a lunar calendar?

Q: Is the lunar calendar a solar calendar or a lunar calendar? Let's go to the agricultural calendar to find the answer.

A: The lunar calendar is neither a lunar calendar nor a solar calendar. It is the traditional calendar of Han nationality in China, also known as Xia calendar, Han calendar and Hua calendar. It is a kind of lunar calendar. It takes the change period of the moon phase as the length of a month and the return year of the sun as the length of a year. By setting leap months, the average calendar year adapts to the tropic year.

1. What is the lunar calendar?

The lunar calendar, also called Xia calendar, Han calendar and Hua calendar, is one of the traditional calendars in China. The main rules have been gradually improved and formed through several dynasties, and their forms have continued to this day. The lunar calendar belongs to a kind of lunar calendar, and the years are divided into flat years and leap years. An average year is twelve months; A leap year consists of twelve ordinary months plus one leap month, which is thirteen months in total. A month is divided into a big month and a small month, with 30 days in the big month and 29 days in the small month, and its average calendar month is equal to the full moon. Which month is big and which month is small in a year is different from year to year, which is determined by calculation. There are 353 ~ 355 days in a normal year and 383 ~ 385 days in a leap year. In order to coordinate the relationship between the new moon and the tropic year, leap months are set to make the average calendar year the tropic year. The leap rule takes the winter solstice as the starting point for calculating the tropical year, starting from the calendar month of the winter solstice in A year and ending in the calendar month of the winter solstice in B year (excluding). If there are only twelve moons, it is a normal year, and there is no leap year. If there are thirteen new moons, the first calendar month without any of the twenty-four solar terms will be used as a leap month, which is called a leap month. In addition, the 24 solar terms of the lunar calendar reflect the characteristics of seasonal changes and contribute to agricultural production and people's lives.

Second, the wrong idea about the lunar calendar.

People commonly call the lunar calendar the lunar calendar, which is actually a widely circulated fallacy. Because the lunar calendar actually belongs to the yin-yang calendar, the wrong common name of the lunar calendar should be abandoned. The real lunar calendar is a calendar arranged according to the change of moon phases, which has nothing to do with seasonal changes, such as the Islamic calendar.

The earliest existing almanac in China is Xia. Since then, the calendar has continued to develop. By the time taichu calendar was formulated in the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, there were already quite perfect calendar rules, which were revised several times later, just to optimize the calculation accuracy, but the rules remained relatively stable. The current lunar calendar is calculated by Purple Mountain Observatory of Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is a part of the official yearbook "Astronomical Calendar of China".

Conclusion: In fact, I only recently discovered that the lunar calendar is not the lunar calendar. The real lunar calendar runs according to the 24 solar terms. We CCTV misled us to some extent, but we didn't pay attention to it at all.