How did the Chinese New Year come about?

The Spring Festival is the first day of the first month of the lunar calendar, also known as the lunar year, commonly known as "New Year's Eve". It is one of the grandest and most lively traditional festivals in China. The Spring Festival has a long history, which originated in the Yin Shang period at the end of the year to sacrifice to the gods and ancestors.

The concept of the Spring Festival and the year, the original meaning from the agricultural, the ancient people of the growth cycle of the grain is called "year", "Shuowen - Wo Department": "year, the grain is ripe also". In the Xia and Shang dynasties produced the Xia calendar, the cycle of the moon for the month, a year divided into twelve months, each month to see the moon for the day for the first day of the first month of the first day of the Zi time is called the first of the year, that is, the beginning of the year, also known as the year, the name of the year is from the Zhou Dynasty, to the Western Han Dynasty was formally fixed, and has been continued to the present day. But the first day of the first month in ancient times was known as "New Year's Day", until China's modern Xinhai Revolution victory, the Nanjing Provisional Government in order to comply with the farming season and facilitate statistics, the provisions of the summer calendar in the civilian population, in the government agencies, factories, mines, schools and organizations in the implementation of the Gregorian calendar to the Gregorian calendar for the first day of the first month of New Year's Day, the first day of the first month of the Chinese lunar calendar, known as the Spring Festival.

September 27, 1949, the founding of the new China, in the first plenary session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, adopted the use of the world's common calendar, the first day of the first month of the Gregorian calendar as New Year's Day, commonly known as the solar year; the first day of the first month of the Lunar Calendar is usually in the spring before and after the start of the first lunar month, and thus the first day of the first month of the Lunar Calendar is designated as "Spring Festival ", commonly known as the year of the lunar calendar.

Traditionally, the Spring Festival refers to the period from the Lunar New Year festival on the eighth day of the Lunar New Year, or the Zaos Festival on the twenty-third day of the Lunar New Year, until the fifteenth day of the first month of the Lunar New Year, which culminates in New Year's Eve and the first day of the first month of the lunar year. In the Spring Festival this traditional holiday period, China's Han Chinese and most ethnic minorities have to hold a variety of celebrations, most of these activities to worship God and Buddha, ancestors, in addition to the old and the new, to welcome Jubilee to receive the blessing, praying for a good year as the main content. Activities in the form of colorful, with a strong ethnic characteristics.