Chinese Calendar Advertisment of the 1920s

By: The China Gateway

Multi-system calendar: Time, revolution and modernity

This calendar gives the year in three different reckonings:

“Republic of China Year 18” -- the Republic of China was declared in 1912

“sui order yiji year”-- this refers to the 60 year cycle in the “stem and branch” system

“Western calendar One thousand nine hundred twenty-nine to thirty” – i.e. the Gregorian calendar

The daily calendar that runs on either side of the illustration is actually two calendars, running side by side: the yin ?, or lunar, calendar, and the yang ?, or solar, one. This kind of “dual-system” calendar was quite common in 1929, and printed in the hundreds of thousands in Shanghai and other cities – not just in poster form, but also as almanacs, flyers, cards and newspaper inserts. Nonetheless, the dual-system calendar was technically illegal at this time, the subject of a ban by the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government. Why would a dual-system calendar have existed, and why would the government have considered it dangerous?

I: Calendars and political power

When Sun Yat-sen declared the founding of the Republic of China on January 1, 1912, he also declared a fundamental change in the way every citizen of the new nation was to measure time. Instead of relying on the variety of available methods of calculating time based primarily on the phases of the moon, as most in China had up until that point, all henceforth were to follow the solar calendar. For Sun, as for many Chinese reformers of his generation, the solar calendar (by and large they meant the Gregorian calendar) represented not just a means of ordering days and months, but a revolution, an international system, and modernity itself. For China not to do as Japan already had and shift to the system used by “civilized” nations (i.e. Europe and America) would endanger the very survival of the nation itself.

The reworking of time in the cause of revolution was nothing new, of course. Examples range from radical experiments such as the French revolutionary calendar to the longer-term inculcation of civic holidays common to the construction of modern nationalism. Often revolutionaries and reformers framed the change in terms of a shift from divine to human right, in the European context secularizing and democratizing a calendar formerly centered on the church and the monarch.

The calendar was also deeply rooted in cosmology and political authority in the Chinese case, but in a rather different configuration. In imperial times the regulation and compilation of the calendar had been the domain of the emperor. In his role as pivot between heaven and earth, the emperor was required both to obtain an understanding of cosmological forces and to enable his subjects to live in perfect social order. Thus his ability to determine the most accurate calendar possible and distribute it annually – with great ceremony – to his officials was an essential part of his “cosmological kingship.” Moreover, it ought to be his sole prerogative, and thus successive dynasties severely restricted the circulation of both calendars and the astronomical equipment essential for calculating them. Not surprisingly, one of the first acts of rebels seeking to overthrow the emperor was to issue a calendar of their own: the Taiping Rebellion provides only the most elaborate example out of many.

In addition, the public designation of years was intimately tied to imperial rule. Beginning in the Han dynasty, emperors began to adopt nian hao ?? or “era names” (sometimes also referred to as “reign names”) carrying auspicious meanings. In early dynasties emperors changed nian hao often – as frequently as every year or even after several months – depending on the circumstances; by the Ming and Qing, nian hao remained stable throughout a single emperor’s reign, and thus the names we commonly use to refer to many of these men – such as Kangxi or Qianlong – are in fact the names of their reigns. Formal documents, therefore, would often be dated with the nian hao year (e.g. “Kangxi 7.”)

Thus it was this legacy, in all its different aspects, that Sun Yat-sen and his fellow revolutionaries wanted to eliminate by establishing a new calendar. Declaring 1912 Year One of the Republic of China symbolized a fresh start associated with no single man, but with a nation. Counting time using the same system that fellow revolutionaries around the world did showed that this nation would be part of the modern world. In this sense, having a calendar that simultaneously marked years of the Republic and the so-called “Western calendar” was not a contradiction, but a necessity. After 1912, successive Republican governments tried to enforce adoption of the new solar calendar; when Sun Yat-sen’s successors in the Nationalist Party gained power in China again in 1927, they made it a priority.

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