Calendar

Li Chun: why the Chinese year starts in February

Three calendars disagree about when the year turns. In BaZi, only one of them counts — and it is the one almost nobody outside China has heard of.

SinoDestiny · updated 7 November 2026 · 6 minute read

What Li Chun is

立春 (lì chūn) means "the establishment of spring". It is one of the 24 solar terms (节气), the calendar of the sun's position that Chinese agriculture and astrology have used for more than two thousand years. Each term marks a 15° segment of the sun's apparent path, and Li Chun is the one at 315° of solar longitude — the point where the sun has climbed far enough past the winter solstice that the season is judged to have turned.

It is not a fixed date. It lands on 3, 4 or 5 February depending on the year, and the exact moment can fall at any hour of the day. A birth at 23:00 on 3 February in a year when Li Chun arrives at 04:00 on 4 February belongs to the previous year's pillar.

Three calendars, three answers

If you were born in the first six weeks of a Gregorian year, you have probably already met this problem without knowing it:

• 1 January — the Gregorian year turns. Irrelevant to BaZi. It is an administrative boundary, adopted in China only in 1912.
• Lunar New Year — the new moon that falls between 21 January and 20 February. This is the festival everyone knows, and it determines the lunar year. It is not the BaZi year boundary, and the two can be up to two weeks apart.
• Li Chun — the solar term around 4 February. This is the boundary BaZi uses, because BaZi is built on the sun's cycle, not the moon's.

So take someone born on 28 January 1990. Lunar New Year fell on 27 January that year, so the festival calendar has already turned and calls them a Horse. Li Chun did not arrive until 4 February, so the BaZi chart places them in 己巳 — the Earth Snake year, the 1989 pillar. Two animals from one date, and only the second one is in the chart.

The window where this bites is the gap between Lunar New Year and Li Chun, which in some years is nearly two weeks wide. In 1990 it was eight days. In 2024, Li Chun came on 4 February but Lunar New Year only on 10 February — the same gap, in the opposite order, so that year a child born in those six days is still a Rabbit by the festival calendar and already a Dragon by the chart.

The months move too

Li Chun does double duty: it begins the year and it begins the first month, 寅 (the Tiger month). The other eleven months each begin at one of the twelve jie (节) solar terms — 惊蛰 around 5 March, 清明 around 5 April, and so on. This is why a BaZi month never lines up with a calendar month: the month pillar changes around the 4th–8th of each Gregorian month, not on the 1st.

Practically, this means the month pillar — which carries the season, and the season is the single strongest influence on a chart — is the pillar most often computed wrongly by hand. The year error affects your animal; the month error affects the whole reading.

Why the boundary is argued about

Not every school agrees. Some practitioners use the lunar new year for the year pillar, particularly in folk traditions where the festival and the chart are treated as one system. Others use the exact astronomical moment of Li Chun, others use the whole day. The differences matter only for a narrow band of birthdays — roughly 1 January to 5 February — but for those people the two conventions produce different animals, different year stems, and therefore different relationships to everything else in the chart.

SinoDestiny uses Li Chun with the exact solar-term moment, which is the mainstream convention in professional practice and the one the calendar engine computes directly. It is also published on the site, so you can check what was applied to your own chart rather than taking it on trust.