Learn · Time · 13 min read · Updated September 2026

Choosing a day

The tradition has a where and a when. The luopan answers the first; the almanac answers the second, and a household that has sited its house still asks it for the day to move in, to open the shop, to raise the roof or to bury. What the almanac is, the twelve officers that govern its days, the spirits that move round its year, what the practitioners use it for, and what a calendar can and cannot do.

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Fig. 01 Looking up through trees at the sky. The almanac’s year is the sun’s and the moon’s, and the tradition read its days off both.

Everything else on this site is about where: which wall, which direction, which room. The tradition has a second question, when, and a second instrument for it. The almanac, the Tong Shu, printed every year since the Tang and sold in every Chinese city still, tells a household which day is fit for which kind of work, and a family that has sited its house by the luopan will still open the almanac for the day to move in. This essay says what the book is, gives the cycle that governs its days and the spirits that move round its year, says what the practitioners use it for, and says what a calendar can and cannot be asked to do.

The book

The almanac is the oldest continuously printed book in the world by most reckonings: the earliest printed one that survives is a Tang calendar of 877, found at Dunhuang, and manuscript almanacs of the same kind were being buried with the dead in the Han, a thousand years before. Smith’s study of divination in the late empire gives its history: the calendar was the emperor’s to issue, since the right to name the year and its days was the mark of the Mandate, and the imperial Board of Astronomy printed the official version every autumn while private presses printed the popular one, thicker, cheaper and full of everything the official calendar left out. The popular almanac is the one that survived the empire. It is still printed in Hong Kong every year, red-covered and several hundred pages thick, and Palmer’s translation of one gives an English reader the whole of it: the calendar, the officers of the days, the lucky and unlucky days, the positions of the year’s spirits, the charms, the dream book, the physiognomy, the letters of the alphabet, and the table of the years.

Fig. 01 One day of the almanac, with everything its column carries. The date is given in both calendars; then the day's stem and branch, one pairing of the sixty; its officer from the cycle of twelve, which is what most households actually read; its lunar mansion from the twenty-eight; its rank among the yellow days and the black; the directions in which the year's spirits stand, which are the directions to leave alone; and last the two lists, what the day is fit for and what it is not, in which marriage, travel, moving house, opening a business, raising a beam, digging, burying, cutting cloth and bathing each appear by name. A household chooses by reading down one column for the work in hand. A practitioner reads across the columns for the client's year, since the day's stem and branch are set against the person's, and a day that clashes with the year of a birth is set aside whatever the officer says. The day drawn here is made up; the structure is not. Palmer's translation gives an English reader a whole Hong Kong almanac of this kind, and Smith's study gives the history of the book and of the Board of Astronomy that once had the sole right to issue it.

Tradition · What is on a page

Each day of the calendar has a column, and the column carries the day’s date in both calendars, its stem and branch, its officer from the cycle of twelve, its lunar mansion from the twenty-eight, its rank among the yellow and the black days, the directions in which the day’s spirits stand, and two lists, what the day is fit for and what it is not: marriage, travel, moving house, opening a business, raising a beam, digging, burying, cutting cloth, bathing, and a dozen more. A household chose by reading down the column for the work in hand, and a practitioner chose by reading across the columns for the client’s year, since the day’s stem and branch are set against the person’s, and a day that clashes with the year of one’s birth is set aside whatever the officer says.

The twelve officers

Fig. 02 The twelve day officers, the jian-chu cycle of the almanac. Every day of the Chinese calendar carries one of twelve officers in turn, establish, remove, full, level, settle, hold, break, danger, complete, receive, open and close, and the almanac says beside each date what the day is fit for. The officer runs on with the earthly branch of the day, so that the cycle slips by one at each solar month, and a reader with the almanac open finds the officer printed in the column of the day. The tradition’s house days are the three marked: settle and complete for moving in, open for opening a door or a business, with the ridge beam raised on a complete or a settle day; break and close are for demolition and burial, and danger for nothing that involves a height. Filled cells are the days the almanac reads as good, open cells the mixed and the bad. The senses follow the almanac’s own glosses as Palmer’s translation of the Tong Shu gives them and Smith’s study of the calendar explains them. The system is old, it is in the Han almanacs found in tombs, and it is a calendar, not a forecast: it tells a household which day the tradition has set aside for which kind of work.

The cycle that governs the days is the jian-chu, the twelve officers, and it is the part of the almanac a reader can learn in an afternoon. Twelve officers follow one another day by day, establish, remove, full, level, settle, hold, break, danger, complete, receive, open and close, tied to the earthly branch of the day so that the cycle slips by one at each solar month and comes round again; and each officer names what its day is fit for. Establish is a beginning, for travel and taking up a post; remove is for clearing and curing; full for storing and gathering and not for marrying; level for levelling ground and laying roads; settle for fixing what should stay fixed, agreements and a house moved into; hold for holding, arrests and repairs; break for demolition and nothing else; danger for nothing that climbs; complete for completing, an opening, a wedding, a move; receive for taking in a harvest and not for starting; open for opening a door, a shop or a well; close for closing, sealing and burial. The manuals reduce the twelve to a rhyme, and the almanac prints the officer in the column of every day, so that nobody has to count.

The spirits of the year

The almanac also has a where, and it is the part of the book that touches feng shui most directly. Each year a set of spirits takes up positions on the compass, and the most important of them is the Tai Sui, the Grand Duke of the year, the spirit of Jupiter’s station, who stands in the direction of the year’s branch and must not be faced or disturbed: a household does not dig, build or break ground in the Tai Sui’s direction that year, and does not sit with its back to him, and the almanac prints his direction on its first page. The three killings, the san sha, occupy the three directions opposite the year’s triad and are not to be disturbed either; the five yellow, the wandering star of the Flying Star year, sits in a sector that the practitioners keep quiet; and the god of joy, the god of wealth and the god of nobility stand in directions that change with the day and are faced for a wedding or a signing. Skinner’s compendium gives the tables and Too’s manual the popular version; the Flying Stars page gives the annual stars that the almanac’s five yellow belongs to.

What the house asks the almanac

The house has four days in the almanac. The day to break ground, which must not be in the Tai Sui’s direction and must be a level or a remove day rather than a break; the day to raise the ridge beam, which the beams guide describes with its red cloth and firecrackers, on a settle or a complete day, at the hour the almanac names; the day to move in, on a settle or a complete day, when the stove is lit for the first time and the household eats its first meal under the roof, which is what the tradition means by moving in; and the day to open a door, a shop or a business, on an open or a complete day, with the sign hung and the first customer served before the hour has passed. Knapp’s survey of the folk beliefs of the house records all four across the provinces, with the almanac open on the table for each.

A month, read

Fig. 03 A month of the almanac, read for a move. Thirty days in a grid of seven, each with its officer, which advances one a day and repeats once, on the twelfth here, where the solar term changes; that repeat is how the almanac keeps the officers in step with the sun, and it is why the same date has different officers in different years. The days whose officer settles, completes or opens are tinted as fit for moving in, eight of them in this month; the break, danger and close days are marked against, for anything but demolition and burial. The animals also run one a day, and the household’s clash animal, the opposite of its own year’s, falls every twelfth day, on the fifth, the seventeenth and the twenty-ninth here, and strikes the fifth, a settle day, out. What is left is seven days in a month on which the almanac allows this household to move, which is the almanac’s usual yield: not a single day, and not any day, but a short list to put the removal van against. The grid is a schema with the rules applied, not a page from a given year’s book. The officer’s repeat at the term and the animal’s twelve-day cycle are the almanac’s; a real month may carry two terms or none.

A page of the almanac is a month, and the drawing above gives one with the rules applied, for a household that wants to move. The officers run one a day and the reading begins by finding them, which the almanac prints in a column beside the date; they repeat once in the month, on the day the solar term changes, and the repeat is the piece most readers miss, because it is the mechanism by which twelve officers stay in step with a year of twenty-four terms and it is why a date that was a settle day one year is a hold day the next. The good days for moving in are the settle, complete and open days, the officers the day officers strip marks for the house, and a month yields seven or eight of them; the break, danger and close days are for demolition and burial and for nothing else, and the rest are neutral, fit for the errands that make a move and not for the move. Then the animals, which run one a day on a cycle of twelve like the officers and unlike them never repeat: the household’s clash animal, the opposite of its own year’s, falls every twelfth day, and where it falls on a good day it strikes the day out, as the fifth is struck in the drawing. The yield is seven days, which is what a household usually finds when it reads a month honestly, and Emmons’s Hong Kong households and Bruun’s Sichuan ones found the same: not a single day, which the paperbacks promise, and not any day, which the sceptic expects, but a short list, from which the removal firm’s diary picks. A household that keeps the month’s seven days and puts the van against one of them has used the almanac as the tradition used it, and the site’s reading is that the day chosen this way is worth exactly what a day can be worth, which is a household that has planned its move and knows the date.

Reading it

Find the year. The almanac’s first pages give the year’s stem and branch, the Tai Sui’s direction and the three killings; note the directions and keep the spade out of them. Without an almanac to hand, the year page computes the same four sectors for any year from 2000 to 2047.
Find the work. Moving in, opening, raising a roof, breaking ground: each has its officers, settle and complete, open, settle and complete, level and remove.
Read down the columns for the weeks that suit you and pick the days whose officer fits and whose column lists the work as fit.
Check the day against the person. A day whose branch clashes with the branch of the householder’s birth year is set aside; the almanac’s table of the years gives the branch.
Take the hour. The columns give the auspicious hours of the day in two-hour watches; the first meal, the first customer, the beam go up in one of them.
Tell everyone. A chosen day is a day everyone keeps, and that is what it is for.