Your BaZi year starts at Li Chun, not Chinese New Year

What Li Chun is

立春 Li Chun is the first of the twenty-four solar terms, the points that divide the solar year in the Chinese calendar. It is an astronomical moment, not a date someone chose: it falls when the sun reaches 315 degrees of ecliptic longitude, which lands on 3, 4 or 5 February depending on the year, and at a precise time of day.

In BaZi, Li Chun is where the year pillar turns. The eleven other pairs of terms mark the month pillars the same way, which is why the BaZi month also starts partway through the calendar month: September 2026 belongs to 丁酉 from 白露 on the 7th, not from the 1st.

A worked example

Someone born on 10 February 1991 at noon in Singapore. Ask three different sources and you may get two different animals.

So the same person is a Goat in their chart and a Horse on the red envelope. Both statements are true of their own calendar. A BaZi chart uses the first.

Why the two calendars differ

Chinese New Year is set by the moon: it is the new moon that begins the first lunar month, so it wanders between late January and late February. Li Chun is set by the sun, so it barely moves. In most years the gap between them is days; in some it is weeks, and it can fall either side.

Who this affects

Anyone born between Li Chun and Chinese New Year, or between Chinese New Year and Li Chun, in whichever order they fall that year. In practice that means births in the first half of February and the last days of January are worth checking. Being born on Li Chun itself matters to the hour: the term has a precise time, and a birth before it belongs to the old year.

How we calculate it

Auspica computes solar-term moments astronomically and to the minute, then converts them to the time zone that applied where and when you were born. There is no table of approximate dates and no rounding to midnight. Li Chun is not a setting, because it is not a matter of opinion; what you can change is the day boundary, whether the hour uses clock time or true solar time, and the method preset, which is "Classic (MY/SG)" by default. How Auspica works out the rest of a chart.

Li Chun, year by year

The moment the year pillar turns, from 1930 to 2040, in UTC+8 (Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China time), with the date Chinese New Year fell that year. Someone born between the two dates has a different animal on each calendar. For a birth elsewhere, the chart converts the same moment to the local time zone.

Questions about Li Chun