New Year is the Spring Festival. However, many people may not know that Chinese only 106 years have passed. Why? Because the previous years were not called the Spring Festival.
Spring Festival
The customs of the New Year have been around for a long time, but the ancient people did not call it the Spring Festival, and the date of the New Year was not the same.
During the Xia Dynasty, the "Summer Calendar", which is now the "Lunar Calendar", was divided into twelve months according to the Tiangandi Branch, corresponding to the Twelve Zodiac Signs, and the Xia people stipulated that Jianyin was the first month, that is, january of each year was the beginning of the New Year, which was not much different from the modern lunar calendar.
However, future generations are different. In the Shang Dynasty, it was stipulated that the december of the Summer calendar was the first month, that is, the first day of December was New Year's Day, so that the merchants' New Year's Eve was a full month earlier than that of the Xia people. The Zhou Dynasty was even more bizarre, setting Jianzi as the first year, that is, the first month of November in the summer calendar and the first day of New Year's Day in the first month of November. After Qin Shi Huang unified the six kingdoms, he believed that the practice of adopting different calendars was really chaotic, so he issued an edict on the unification of the whole country to Jianhai as the right, that is, the first day of october in the summer calendar was New Year's Day.
Before the Qin Dynasty, we will find that the dates of the Chinese New Year are different. The Xia Dynasty, like today, is the first lunar month of the New Year. The Shang Dynasty was the first day of the first month of December in the lunar calendar, the Zhou Dynasty was the first day of November, and the Qin Dynasty was the first day of October.
Of course, although these dynasties have different New Year's days, the customs of the New Year are roughly the same.
Spring festival
At the beginning of the Han Dynasty, it basically followed the calendar system of the Qin Dynasty, stipulating that the New Year was celebrated on October 1 every year. Later, Sima Qian formulated a more rigorous "Taichu Calendar", which coincided with the time of the modern Spring Festival. The Taichu calendar was used until the end of the Western Han Dynasty, until Wang Mang usurped the Han Dynasty and was abolished, wang Mang changed to the Yin calendar to consolidate his rule and promote "retro", and took December as the first month. The Three Kingdoms and the Western Jin Dynasty basically followed the Han system, stipulating that the New Year would be celebrated on December 1. During the Southern Dynasty Liu Song Dynasty, the Song Emperor Liu Yilong was bent on leaving a name in Qingshi, and the lowest cost was to change the calendar, so he promulgated the Yuan Jia Calendar in the twenty-second year of Yuan Jia (445 AD), stipulating that the first month of the Xia calendar was positive. Since then, the tradition of taking the first day of the first month of the summer calendar as the annual festival has been basically established.
At that time, the New Year was not called the Spring Festival, but different names.
The ancients referred to the year, and the titles were different from dynasty to dynasty. For example, the New Year was once called the first year of the year, the New Year, the New Year, the New Year, the New Year, the New Year, the New Year, the New Year, and so on.
At that time, the New Year was not called the Spring Festival. The Spring Festival did not appear in the dictionary of the Chinese until 1914. After the Xinhai Revolution, the Gregorian calendar was adopted during the Beiyang government of the Republic of China in 1912, but the "Republic of China" era was used, and January 1 was the beginning of the Gregorian calendar. In 1914, the government of the Republic of China regarded the first day of the first lunar month as the "Spring Festival", which was regarded as the beginning of the lunar year, that is, the beginning of the year. In that year, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of China government submitted a request for instructions to report, "it is proposed to request the new year of the lunar calendar as the Spring Festival", and after receiving the approval, the people called the New Year the Spring Festival, so the saying of the Spring Festival gradually spread
On September 27, 1949, the first plenary session of the Chinese Political Consultative Conference decided to adopt the "Common Era Chronology Law", calling January 1 of the Gregorian calendar "New Year's Day" and the first day of the first lunar month of the summer calendar still called "Spring Festival".
Through this history, we know that Chinese the Spring Festival, in fact, it was only 106 years. 【Author: Daily Kanji】?