Learn · Time · 14 min read · Updated September 2026

The house through the year

The tradition kept a house by the calendar as well as by the compass. The sun’s year in twenty-four terms and the moon’s in twelve months, the sweeping of the dust and the Kitchen God’s departure, the couplets and the door gods at New Year, the graves at Qingming, the herbs at the door in the fifth month, the moon in the eighth, the solstice; the house that changed with the seasons; and what the research says about the winter light.

Oriented S 168°

Fire

Fig. 01 The morning window. The house’s year is the sun’s, and the tradition read its days off the light.

A house in the tradition is not arranged once. It is kept, through a year that has a shape, and the shape is the calendar’s: the sun’s year in twenty-four terms, the moon’s in twelve months, and a round of days on which the house is swept, pasted, guarded, opened to the moon and gathered round a table. This essay draws the ring, sets the house’s days on it, and follows the house through them, because the rules the site gives for rooms were kept by households that also kept these, and the two were one practice.

Two calendars, one ring

Fig. 01 The year as the tradition keeps it. The ring is the twenty-four solar terms, fifteen degrees of the sun’s path each, from the winter solstice at the top, sunwise: the solstices and the equinoxes are named inside the ring, the starts of the four seasons are the heavier ticks between them, and the sixteen others, the rains, the dews, the heats and the snows, are the light ticks. The house’s days are set outside the ring where they fall: the sweeping of the dust and the Kitchen God’s departure in the last days of the old year, the couplets and the door gods pasted at New Year, the graves swept at Qingming, calamus and mugwort hung at the door in the fifth month against the summer’s sickness, the moon watched from the courtyard in the eighth, and the solstice, when the year turns and the family eats together. The lunar festivals drift a little against the solar ring from year to year; the terms do not. The solar terms are the calendar’s fixed frame, tied to the sun and printed in every almanac; the festivals are lunar and move within a fortnight of the places drawn. The house that keeps them is the courtyard house of the north, whose year the terms were written for.

The Chinese calendar counts twice. The sun’s year is divided into twenty-four solar terms, jieqi, fifteen degrees of the sun’s path each, from the winter solstice round: the starts of the four seasons, the solstices and equinoxes between them, and sixteen more named for the weather they bring, the rains, the dews, the heats and the snows. The terms are fixed, since the sun is, and they are the farmer’s calendar and the almanac’s frame; the choosing a day essay gives the almanac. The moon’s year is twelve months of twenty-nine or thirty days, with a thirteenth every third year or so to keep it in step with the sun, and the festivals are lunar: the New Year on the first day of the first month, the lanterns on the fifteenth, the boats on the fifth of the fifth, the moon on the fifteenth of the eighth. The festivals drift within a fortnight against the solar ring, and the ring holds still. Bodde’s study of the Han year reconstructs the round as the court and the household kept it two thousand years ago, and most of it is still kept.

The last month: sweeping, and the god goes up

The year’s housekeeping is a rite before it is a chore. In the last days of the twelfth month the house is swept from the roof beams down, the dust of the year taken out through the door and not the window, the surfaces cleared and the broken things thrown away; the tradition calls it sweeping the dust, and it is the origin of the rule the clutter guide gives, that the tradition’s order is an annual clearing and not a permanent minimalism. On the twenty-third or twenty-fourth the Kitchen God is sent to heaven to report on the household, his paper image burned with offerings of sticky sweets, and the stove is cleaned and rested until the new image is pasted up at New Year; the kitchen page gives him his due. The debts are paid, the lanterns mended, the door repainted if it is to be, and the household bathes on the last night. The house enters the year clean, still and closed, which is the yin end of the tradition’s gradient, so that the year can begin at the yang.

New Year: the door dressed

The door is the house’s face and the New Year dresses it. On the eve the couplets are pasted either side of the front door, two lines of verse on red paper with a third across the lintel, chosen or written for the household, and the door gods are pasted on the leaves, the two Tang generals who kept the emperor’s nightmares away and have kept everyone’s door since; a character for fortune goes on the door upside down, because the word for upside down sounds like the word for arrives. Firecrackers are let off at midnight to frighten off what the old year left, the family eats together with the door closed, and on the first morning the door is opened with a phrase for the year. The front door guide gives the door gods and the threshold; Knapp’s survey of the house’s folk beliefs records the couplets and the gods from province to province and the reds of the paper as the one colour a commoner’s house was allowed. The lanterns of the fifteenth close the festival, hung at the door and the eaves and carried through the streets, the year’s first light in the house’s first month.

Fig. 02 The house's face on the eve of the New Year. Two strips of verse are pasted down either side of the door and a third across the lintel; the two Tang generals who kept an emperor's nightmares away are pasted one on each leaf; the character for fortune goes on a red lozenge, set upside down because the word for upside down sounds like the word for arrives; and a pair of lanterns hangs from the eave, to be carried through the streets on the fifteenth when the festival closes. The threshold, which the tradition asks a bride to be carried over and a coffin to be lifted across, is the line all of this is arranged around. Knapp records the couplets, the gods and the reds from province to province, and notes that red paper was the one colour a commoner's house was allowed. The drawing is a southern double-leaf door at about two metres; the same dressing goes on a flat's single leaf, and the strips are sold ready-printed. Everything drawn here is paper and is renewed each year, which is the point: the house says what year it is and who lives in it, and takes it down when the year is old.

Qingming: the graves swept

Fifteen days after the spring equinox comes Qingming, clear and bright, the one solar term that is also a festival. The family goes to the graves, clears the grass and the earth from them, repairs the mound, lays out food and burns paper money, and eats at the tomb; the yin house, which the yin house page draws, is kept as the yang house is, once a year, by the same people. It is also the day the manuals give for reading the grave’s siting, since the family is there and the hills are green, and a geomancer who has been asked about the family’s fortune is asked at Qingming. In the city the willow is hung at the door and the kites are flown, and the festival is the tradition’s spring cleaning of the dead.

The fifth month: the door guarded

The fifth day of the fifth month, Duanwu, the dragon-boat festival, is the year’s hinge of danger in the tradition: the heat arrives, the insects wake, and the month was reckoned poisonous. The house answers at the door. Calamus and mugwort are hung either side of it, the one for its sword-shaped leaves and the other for its smell, which keeps the insects off and was thought to keep the sickness off with them; a picture of Zhong Kui, the demon-queller, is pasted up; the children are given scented sachets and threads of five colours; and the wine is dosed with realgar. Bodde finds the fifth-month exorcisms in the Han, and the manuals of the house keep them: it is the one festival whose rites are entirely about the threshold and what must not cross it, which is the sha catalogue’s concern in the language of herbs.

The eighth month: the moon from the courtyard

The fifteenth of the eighth month is the moon’s festival, and it is the one the courtyard house was built for. The family sits in the court, the one open room of the house, and watches the full moon rise; the mooncakes are eaten, the pomelos peeled, the osmanthus wine drunk, and the round table is set under the open sky. A house without a court uses a balcony, a roof or a window that faces east, and the outside page’s balcony kept as open ground is a balcony that can hold the year’s one evening of looking up. The festival is the tradition’s reminder that the house has an outside and that the outside is part of it.

The house through the seasons

Tradition · A house that changed with the year

The house the rules were written for changed with the seasons as the calendar turned. In the north the brick bed, the kang, was lit at the first cold and stayed warm from the kitchen flue until the spring; the lattice windows were papered afresh before the winter and the paper taken down and the lattices opened at the start of summer; the summer mats went down on the beds and the winter quilts came out of the chests at the terms that name them; the door curtains changed from cloth to bamboo and back. Wen Zhenheng’s treatise, which Clunas studied, gives the scholar’s version, the scroll on the wall changed with the season and the flowers on the table with it, which the art guide draws. A house in the tradition was not finished; it was kept, and keeping it was a calendar.

Evidence · The winter light

The one seasonal thing the research has measured in a house is the light. Rosenthal and colleagues named the winter depression in 1984 and treated it with bright light in the morning; the finding has held, and the treatment is a lamp of ten thousand lux for half an hour after waking, or a walk in the winter morning, which is what the tradition’s east window and the almanac’s early rising gave a household for nothing. Wright and colleagues’ campers reset their clocks to the sun in a week in summer; in winter the sun is late and weak, and the lighting guide gives the lamps that stand in for it. The tradition’s seasonal house, opened in summer and closed in winter, had the physiology right and the winter light wrong, and the lamp is the one thing the modern house can add to it.

The seasons, room by room

Fig. 03 One house, four times. A section through the main hall of a northern courtyard house and the court before it, drawn in each season with what the calendar changed. In winter the kang, the brick bed against the back wall, is lit from the kitchen flue and stays warm until spring; the lattice windows are papered afresh, the door curtain is cloth and the quilts are out of the chests. In spring the paper comes down at the sweeping before the New Year, the house is cleaned to the corners and the couplets and the door gods go up on the gate. In summer the lattices stand open, the mats are down on the kang, the curtain is bamboo and the mugwort and calamus hang at the door for the fifth month. In autumn the chests are opened for the quilts, the harvest goes into the store and the household sits in the court on the fifteenth of the eighth month for the moon, which the court was built to frame. The house is the same house in all four; what the tradition kept was its dressing, on the calendar’s days. The kang, the paper windows and the curtains are the northern house’s; a southern house changed its shutters and its mats and lit no kang. Knapp’s field surveys give the seasonal fittings; Bodde and Wen Zhenheng give the days.

The four sections above are one hall of one northern house, drawn in each season with what the calendar changed in it, and they are the tradition’s answer to a question the site is often asked, which is whether feng shui was ever more than a plan. It was also a calendar of fittings. In winter the kang, the brick bed the houses essay gives, was lit at the first cold from the kitchen flue and the whole household slept on it; the lattice windows were papered afresh, the door curtain was cloth, and the quilts came out of the chests. At the sweeping before the New Year the paper came down, the house was cleaned to the corners and the soot swept from the flue, and the couplets and the door gods went up on the gate, which the household gods essay gives; a northern house in spring was a house between papers, open for the first time since autumn. In summer the lattices stood open and the mats went down on the kang, the curtain changed to bamboo, which let the air through and kept the flies out, and on the fifth of the fifth month the mugwort and the calamus hung at the door, the tradition’s one explicit seasonal cure and the one with a reason a modern reader accepts, since both plants repel insects. In autumn the chests were opened for the quilts, the harvest went into the store, and on the fifteenth of the eighth month the household sat in the court for the moon, which the court, open to the south and framed by the hall, was built to hold. Knapp’s surveys record the fittings, and Bodde’s festivals record the days; what the site records is that the house did not change and its dressing did, on the calendar, and that a modern flat which changes its curtains, its bedding and its windows with the terms is keeping the same calendar without a kang.

The house’s year, in order

The last month. Sweep from the beams down, out through the door; clear the broken and the merely kept; clean the stove; pay what is owed.
New Year. Couplets at the door, the gods on the leaves, the door closed for the meal and opened for the year; lanterns on the fifteenth.
Qingming. The graves, and the garden’s first cut; the willow at the door.
The fifth month. Herbs at the door, the house aired against the heat, the mats down.
The eighth month. The moon from the court, the balcony or the east window; the quilts out at the first frost.
The solstice. The family at the table on the longest night; the lamp in the morning until spring.