Chinese Calendar - Make Your Own

This site provides printable and browsable Chinese calendar for any Gregorian (commonly used) calendar month and/or year since the last reform of the Chinese calendar in 1645 A.D.. Start by picking one of the formats on the upper left or read more for descriptions of them. EPS can be scaled and embedded in other documents. HTML is more readable on line. JPEG may be easier for embedding. PDF is easier for printing. One can also create a customized calendar with a picture of your choice or annotations and download the ccal program that computes the Chinese calendar.

Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar based on the motions of the sun and the moon as observed on the earth. While each month is determined by the moon and thus is lunar, the solar terms, or jieqi, are determined by the positions of the sun. That's why the date of the first day of a lunar month varies but the date of a solar term stays relatively fixed. Since the period of revolution for the moon around the earth and that of the earth around the sun are not exact multiples, it is necessary to add a leap month once in a while and the rules for adding a leap month is simple in principle but obscure to one without the required astronomical knowledge and difficult to compute and apply. The result is that few people know how to compute the Chinese calendar and the printed calendars are almost the sole source for most people to know the time of traditional Chinese holidays such as the Spring Festival or the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Now, there is an alternative. Through this site, you can:

• Get Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) pictures, now with optional Windows preview, of Chinese calendar for any given Gregorian calendar month or year to be printed or embedded in other documents to make do-it-yourself calendars. You may want to take a look at this step by step tutorial if you are new to embedding EPS pictures in documents.
• View the Chinese calendar (simplified characters or traditional characters) for any given Gregorian calendar month or year (Chinese font required) in a table format. Easy on eyes to read on-line.
• Get PNG or JPEG Chinese calendar for any given Gregorian calendar month or year for easy viewing and embedding in other documents to make do-it-yourself calendars. PNG format also has transparent background.
• Get PDF Chinese calendar for any given Gregorian calendar month or year for easy viewing and especially printing. Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 or later or another PDF interpreter.
• Get XML Chinese calendar for any given Gregorian calendar month or year for creating calendars with customized appearance and information through XSLT or XSL-FO.
• Design Your Own Chinese calendar with a picture of your choice, such as one from your digital camera. Just upload a picture or specify one picture on the web and your customized Chinese calendar with that picture will be returned in PDF format for easy viewing and printing. The same picture can be optionally inserted into multiple calendars at once. Most popular image formats are supported. The calendar share option will keep the generated calendar on this server for 7 days so that you can send the URL for it to family and friends to share your creation. The auto crop feature can help you fit the picture into the calendar better.
• Get Annotated Chinese calendar for a given Gregorian calendar month of any year. You can enter a short reminder note for any day of the month and easily convert it to PDF. You can also specify any day as holiday and have it colored in red.

• Last and the best part, download the ccal program which generates these calendars so you don't have to wait for the congested network. The current version is 2.5.3. It is released under the GNU General Public License and portions related to computing of Chinese dates are distributed under the terms of the GNU Less General Public License.

If you are more interested in detailed background and technical information on Chinese calendar, you may want to check this site: The Chinese Calendar. For a conversion utility that coverts date between a number of calendar systems, the Calendrica Applet on the calendarists site is a good one.

Learn Cantonese & Mandarin Chinese | EPS | HTML | PNG/JPEG | PDF | XML | Design | Annotate | Software

English | 简体中文 | 繁體中文