Publications 出版物

This section is the entry point to everything published on this site. The full index — datasets, preprints, code and citation formats, with DOIs and GitHub repositories — is on the English page; the five language editions correspond one to one and in the same order, and none is short of an entry.

相关 / Related：数据集 ｜ 术语命名空间 ｜ 论文

Author: Chujia Kuang, pen-name Jiayan-Yide, Independent Researcher.

Preprints: any item marked preprint has not been peer-reviewed and should not be treated as a settled result.

Citation: if you use a dataset or preprint from this site, cite the Zenodo concept DOI rather than this blog page.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22788686

Section 1 — Dataset

中国历法公共数据集（Chinese Calendar Open Datasets）
Chujia Kuang (邝楚嘉). Dataset, v1.0.0. CC BY 4.0.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22788686 ｜ Code: github.com/Kuangchujia/chinese-calendar-dataset

A downloadable, citable and independently verifiable collection of Chinese calendrical data. Three interlinked assets: (A1) the exact instants of the 24 solar terms for 1900–2052, to the second (3,672 records), computed from JPL DE421 with the definition set by GB/T 33661-2017 and matching the Purple Mountain Observatory’s published 2026 values 24/24; (A2) a chronology of 52 historical calendar reforms with their periods of use, compilers and year-beginnings; (A3) a day-by-day sexagenary (ganzhi) day-count for 1900–2052 (55,883 days). The collection contains calendrical facts only — no predictions and nothing referring to individuals.

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Section 2 — Preprints

Note on section 2. 17 preprint entries follow. 17 carry a DOI; none are forthcoming. Where a DOI is given, it is the version of record for that preprint. All preprints in this section are released under CC BY 4.0.

002 · 立春换岁，还是正月初一换岁？ / When Does the Year Turn: at Lichun, or at the First Day of the First Month?

preprint, not peer-reviewed.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22803746

Starting from a question that recurs every Spring Festival — for a child born between Lichun (4 February) and the New Year (17 February), which zodiac year applies? — this paper traces the two competing conventions for the turning of the year, shows how the shifting position of the first month across dynasties produced the coexistence of both, and sets out the textual clues used in deciding between them.

Blog post (Chinese): 立春换岁，还是正月初一换岁？ — see the Articles section for a plain-language walkthrough.

003 · 三本历法·三种时间 / Three Calendars, Three Kinds of Time

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22821576

Beginning with the fact that October 1582 was simply skipped over in Europe by ten days, this paper argues that a calendar is a dial inscribed on the motion of the heavens. It sets out the reference point of each of three systems — the solar calendar, the lunar calendar, and the stems-and-branches calendar — and shows why it is inaccurate to call the Chinese lunisolar calendar a “lunar” one.

Blog post (Chinese): 三本历法·三种时间 — see the Articles section for a plain-language walkthrough.

Blog post (English): Three Calendars, Three Kinds of Time — the English version of this preprint.

004 · 立春不是一整天，只有一秒钟 / Lichun Is Not a Day; It Is a Second

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22837998

Lichun is not a day but an instant, fixed to the second. Taking a real solar-term instant as its example, the paper sets out the astronomical definition of a solar term and the computation of its time, and explains why giving only the date of a birth is insufficient.

Blog post (Chinese): 立春不是一整天，只有一秒钟 — see the Articles section for a plain-language walkthrough.

005 · 正月本来不是一月 / The First Month Was Not Originally Month One

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22851039

The characters 正月 did not originally denote the first calendar month, but whichever month the year began in. The paper traces the historical shifts in the year-beginning and explains how the direction pointed to by the handle of the Big Dipper fixed the months, giving rise to the month-建 names 寅, 卯, 辰 and the rest.

Blog post (Chinese): 正月本来不是一月 — see the Articles section for a plain-language walkthrough.

006 · 古人的一天，从晚上十一点开始 / The Old Day Began at Eleven in the Evening

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22866122

The traditional Chinese day began at eleven in the evening, that is, with the hour 子. The paper explains from the sun’s position why 子 is the point of the day furthest from the sun, and uses this to account for the twelve double-hours as a scale.

007 · 钟表上的出生时间，不等于你出生的时辰 / Clock Time Is Not the Hour You Were Born In

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22884370

Clock time and true solar time are not the same thing. Taking Chengdu, where noon by the clock corresponds to 10:56 by the sun, the paper sets out the definition and conversion of true solar time, and states when the difference may be disregarded. It does not discuss any individual case.

008 · 时间是怎么产生的？ / How Is a Day Produced?

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22906313

“Twenty-four hours in a day” is not exact. The paper distinguishes the sidereal from the solar day, explains how the earth’s simultaneous rotation and revolution produce a shortfall of nearly four minutes a day, and relates that shortfall to the time-scale in ordinary use.

009 · 天上三条道：黄道、白道、赤道 / Three Roads in the Sky: Ecliptic, Lunar Path, Celestial Equator

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22926807

The three roads in the sky. Beginning with the sun’s annual eastward circuit among the stars, the paper accounts for the ecliptic, and distinguishes the moon’s path from the celestial equator by their respective reference frames.

010 · 古人的星空：三垣与二十八宿 / The Ancient Chinese Sky: Three Enclosures and Twenty-Eight Mansions

preprint, not peer-reviewed.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22797854

Starting from a lacquered wooden chest (archaeological no. E.66) unearthed in 1978 from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng at Leigudun, Suixian (present-day Suizhou), Hubei. The inscription on its lid records part of the twenty-eight lunar mansions and is among the earliest surviving material evidence for their names. The paper then explains what the twenty-eight mansions are, how the sky was divided among them, their relation to the Three Enclosures (Purple Forbidden, Supreme Palace, Heavenly Market), the role of the determinative stars in astronomical measurement, and the correspondence between the four images (Azure Dragon, White Tiger, Vermilion Bird, Dark Warrior) and the mansions.

011 · 没有指南针，古人怎么定方向 / Finding North Before the Compass

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22948873

Beginning with the Song-dynasty Pingzhou Ketan, which records a sea captain navigating “by the stars at night, by the sun by day, and by the compass when overcast” — showing the compass to have been a fallback rather than the primary means — the paper examines how directions were fixed, from the Zhouli · Kaogongji and other sources, before the magnetic needle came aboard.

012 · 干支：从一棵树到二十二个字 / Ganzhi: From a Tree to Twenty-Two Characters

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22949963

The term 干支 was originally written 幹枝, “trunk and branches”, and was not at first a set of ordinal signs. The paper traces its derivation through Cai Yong’s Yueling Zhangju (Eastern Han) and sets out how the ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches are constituted.

013 · Sixty, Not One Hundred and Twenty: The Parity Rule That Generates the Chinese Sexagenary Cycle

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22990186 ｜ English essay, under submission to preprints.org

Ten heavenly stems paired with twelve earthly branches yield exactly sixty designations, though two such series admit one hundred and twenty ordered pairs. This essay identifies the single generative constraint responsible for the reduction: each series is divided by parity into two classes of equal size, and pairing is permitted only within a class, so that exactly half of the conceivable pairs survive. The same total follows independently from the least common multiple of ten and twelve. Two structural consequences are then traced — the cycle’s name 花甲, and its division into six ten-day periods, each leaving two branches unpaired.

Blog post (English): Ten Stems, Twelve Branches: Why Only Sixty Pairings Remain — the blog version of this essay.

017 · 一年为什么被切成二十四段 / Why the Year Is Cut into Twenty-Four Parts

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23077184

The year is cut into twenty-four solar terms, and the cut is not arbitrary. The national standard GB/T 33661—2017 defines a solar term as the instant at which the apparent geocentric ecliptic longitude of the Sun equals an integral multiple of fifteen degrees; three hundred and sixty divided by fifteen gives twenty-four. Zero degrees of the ecliptic is fixed at the vernal equinox, so the terms run from 0° at the equinox to 270° at the winter solstice and back. Because the Gregorian calendar and the solar terms measure the same body, the Sun, their graduations line up and the Gregorian dates of the terms drift by only a day or two from year to year, while their dates in the lunar calendar swing by as much as a month. The twenty-four names fall into two batches: eight that mark the Sun’s key stations, and sixteen that describe finer changes of climate; they divide again into two groups of twelve, the jie at the head of the lunar month and the qi at its middle. The earliest document to record the complete list of twenty-four names is the Huainanzi, chapter “Tianwen xun”, of the Western Han; the Shiji refers to the “twenty-four sections” without listing them.

C003 · 曾侯乙墓漆箱二十八宿图：四象体系的下限 / Twenty-Eight Mansions on the Lacquer Box from the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng: A Lower Bound for the Four Images

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23032029

Taking the twenty-eight-mansion lacquer chest (no. E.66, generally dated to around 433 BCE) from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng at Leigudun, Suixian (present-day Suizhou), Hubei, the paper asks which end of the “four images” a single excavated object can pin down. It first draws a chronological limit: an object supplies only a lower bound — a terminus ante quem — and cannot supply an upper bound. It then separates “four images” into three layers — twenty-eight star names forming a closed list; the list divided four ways into seven each; each group paired with an animal — and dates the latest possible time of each layer separately: the dragon-and-tiger pairing with east and west reaches back 6460±135 years (the shell mosaic in tomb 45 at Xishuipo, Puyang, Henan); the twenty-eight names as a set, to around 433 BCE; the fourfold division with one animal each, to the Eastern Han.

Blog post (Chinese): 曾侯乙墓漆箱二十八宿图：四象体系的下限 — see the Articles section for a plain-language walkthrough.

Blog post (English): Twenty-Eight Mansions on the Lacquer Box from the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng: A Lower Bound for the Four Images — the English version of this preprint.

C004 · 圭表测影与「日至」：登封观星台之前的实测传统 / The Gnomon and the Sun at Its Utmost: An Empirical Tradition of Shadow-Measurement before the Dengfeng Observatory

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23113570

At Gaocheng, a town in Dengfeng, Henan, the Yuan-dynasty observatory terrace built under Guo Shoujing stands behind a stone baseline thirty-six metres long, made to measure the noon shadow. The paper deals with what came before that terrace. The same pole and the same shadow have been read for two different things — direction and length — and the paper keeps them apart before tracing the term 「日至」, “the sun at its utmost”, from the oracle-bone inscriptions through the Zuo Zhuan to a Western Han calendar manuscript from Hujiacaochang. It explains the gnomon (表) and the baseline rule (圭); describes the lacquered pole from Taosi, at 171.8 cm the earliest excavated instrument of the kind; shows that 「地中」 is a reading off a ruler — an eight-chi gnomon casting a noon solstice shadow of one chi five cun — and therefore moves with latitude; and ends with how a repeated solstice reading yields a tropical year of 365.25 days. Statements are labelled 【通说】 (a general view) or 【一说】 (one view); the piece is descriptive and carries no prediction.

Blog post (Chinese): 圭表测影与「日至」：登封观星台之前的实测传统 — see the Articles section for a plain-language walkthrough.

Blog post (English): The Gnomon and the Sun at Its Utmost: An Empirical Tradition of Shadow-Measurement before the Dengfeng Observatory — the English version of this preprint.

C005 · 「颛顼历」与秦至汉初历法的考古证据 / The Zhuanxu Calendar and the Archaeological Evidence for the Calendars of Qin and the Early Han

preprint, not peer-reviewed. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23149213

This essay is about a calendar known almost entirely from a single sentence. The histories record that Qin Shi Huang, having unified the realm, adopted the 「颛顼历」, the Zhuanxu calendar, and fixed the head of the year at the tenth month; and that the Han took the same calendar over without change until the Taichu reform of 104 BCE. What the calendar itself looked like — how many days the year held, which months were long and which short, where the intercalary month was placed, which day began a month — the transmitted texts do not say. Excavated bamboo slips do. This piece sets the three textual statements against three groups of excavated calendar manuscripts: the calendar for the thirty-fourth year of Qin Shi Huang (213 BCE) from tomb no. 30 at Zhoujiatai in Jingzhou; the eighteen-slip calendar from tomb no. 247 at Zhangjiashan, running from the fifth year of Han Gaozu to the second year of Empress Lü (202–186 BCE); and the thirty-two-slip table from tomb no. 2 at Yinqueshan, for the first year of Yuanguang (134 BCE), which corrects an error carried for a thousand years by the Song Zizhi tongjian mulu. It explains why the intercalary month was called 「后九月」, the “latter ninth month”; sets out the Qin–Chu month-name concordance from the Shuihudi Rishu; and separates what the slips can be shown to support from what remains inference. Where a point is one view among others rather than a general one, it is labelled 【一说】 (one view). The piece is descriptive and carries no prediction.

Blog post (Chinese): 「颛顼历」与秦至汉初历法的考古证据 — see the Articles section for a plain-language walkthrough.

Blog post (English): The Zhuanxu Calendar and the Archaeological Evidence for the Calendars of Qin and the Early Han — the English version of this preprint.

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Section 3 — Elsewhere

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Section 4 — Code / Software

chinese-calendar-dataset
Chujia Kuang (邝楚嘉). Source repository, no tagged release. CC BY 4.0.
GitHub: github.com/Kuangchujia/chinese-calendar-dataset

The generation code behind Section 1: Python scripts that build the solar-term instants, the calendar-reform chronology and the sexagenary day-count, together with the data files themselves, a CITATION.cff and the Zenodo deposit metadata.

kuangchujia-preprints
Chujia Kuang (邝楚嘉). Source repository, no tagged release. CC BY 4.0.
GitHub: github.com/Kuangchujia/kuangchujia-preprints

Chinese and English source files for the preprint series in Section 2, with their Zenodo deposit metadata. Cite the individual Zenodo DOI rather than the repository.

(The items above are released under CC BY 4.0 unless stated otherwise. Preprints have not been peer-reviewed.)

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Section 5 — Citation in GB/T 7714—2025 form

China’s national standard GB/T 7714—2025《信息与文献 参考文献著录规则》（2025-12-02 发布，2026-07-01 实施）newly lists dataset（DS） and preprint（PP） as document types, with /OL as the carrier code for online resources. The entries below follow that standard and may be copied directly; replace the access date with your own.

Dataset — 数据集 [DS/OL]

邝楚嘉. 中国历法公共数据集: 二十四节气交节时刻、历代历法改革年表、干支纪日对照表[DS/OL]. V1.0.0. Zenodo(2026-09-16)[2026-09-19]. https://zenodo.org/records/22788686. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.22788686.

Preprints — 预印本 [PP/OL]

邝楚嘉. 立春换岁, 还是正月初一换岁?[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-09-17)[2026-09-19]. https://zenodo.org/records/22803746. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.22803746.

邝楚嘉. 三本历法·三种时间[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-09-18)[2026-09-19]. https://zenodo.org/records/22821576. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.22821576.

邝楚嘉. 立春不是一整天, 只有一秒钟[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-09-18)[2026-09-20]. https://zenodo.org/records/22837998. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.22837998.

邝楚嘉. 正月本来不是一月[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-09-20)[2026-09-20]. https://zenodo.org/records/22851039. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.22851039.

邝楚嘉. 古人的一天, 从晚上十一点开始[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-09-21)[2026-09-21]. https://zenodo.org/records/22866122. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.22866122.

邝楚嘉. 钟表上的出生时间, 不等于你出生的时辰[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-09-22)[2026-09-22]. https://zenodo.org/records/22884370. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.22884370.

邝楚嘉. 时间是怎么产生的?[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-09-23)[2026-09-23]. https://zenodo.org/records/22906313. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.22906313.

邝楚嘉. 天上三条道: 黄道、白道、赤道[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-09-24)[2026-09-24]. https://zenodo.org/records/22926807. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.22926807.

邝楚嘉. 古人的星空: 三垣与二十八宿[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-09-16)[2026-09-19]. https://zenodo.org/records/22797854. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.22797854.

邝楚嘉. 一年为什么被切成二十四段[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-10-01)[2026-10-03]. https://zenodo.org/records/23077184. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.23077184.

邝楚嘉. 曾侯乙墓漆箱二十八宿图: 四象体系的下限[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-09-29)[2026-09-29]. https://zenodo.org/records/23032029. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.23032029.

邝楚嘉. 圭表测影与「日至」: 登封观星台之前的实测传统[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-10-03)[2026-10-03]. https://zenodo.org/records/23113570. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.23113570.

邝楚嘉. 「颛顼历」与秦至汉初历法的考古证据[PP/OL]. Zenodo(2026-10-05)[2026-10-05]. https://zenodo.org/records/23149213. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.23149213.

Note. Entries above without a DOI are listed as forthcoming and should not be cited as preprints until a DOI is assigned. Every item marked preprint on this page is not peer-reviewed.