About Zodiac Almanac

Zodiac Almanac is an English-language reference for the Chinese zodiac, Tai Sui, Flying Star Feng Shui and the almanac, written for the 2027 year of the Fire Goat and rebuilt each year. It is run by a small editorial team with a Chinese-language background in the classical texts and a software background in calendar computation. Contact: hello@zodiacalmanac.com.

Method: rules first, prose second

Every fact on a page is produced by a rule before any sentence is written about it. Solar terms and lunar dates come from astronomical calendar libraries (tyme4ts, cross-checked against lunar-typescript, both by the same author and MIT licensed); sign relationships come from the twelve-branch tables of Six Harmony, Three Harmony, Clash, Harm, Punishment and Destruction; the Flying Star chart from the Lo Shu flight; auspicious dates from the Twelve Day Officers (建除十二神) and the almanac's recommend/avoid lists. The prose then describes what those rules say, in the language of the classical texts ("traditionally read as"), and never adds a prediction of its own.

Conventions we use — and state on the page

• Year boundary: Lichun. The zodiac year, Tai Sui and Feng Shui chart change at Lichun (in 2027: 4 Feb 2027, 09:46 (Beijing time, UTC+8)). Wherever the New Year boundary gives a different answer we show both.
• Solar terms are instants. They are compared as moments in time (converted to UTC), so a birth in New York and a birth in Beijing at the same instant fall on the same side of Lichun.
• True solar time for day and hour pillars. Birthplace longitude and the equation of time are applied to the clock time before the day and hour are read; the birthplace's historical time zone (including daylight saving) is taken from the IANA database.
• Late Zi hour (23:00–24:00): new day. The day pillar changes at 23:00, the convention of most calculators; the "same day" school is supported in our engine and will be a switch in the calculators.

What we do not do

No predictions of health, money or legal outcomes; no daily horoscopes; no subscriptions; no AI-generated readings that ignore the chart. Everything is for entertainment and cultural exploration, as the footer on every page says.

Sources

Classical relationship tables: 《三命通会》, 《渊海子平》; day officers and almanac: 《协纪辨方书》; Flying Star: 《沈氏玄空学》 and the standard 1864 Jia Zi epoch; Tai Sui generals: the sixty-general list used in Taoist temples. Where our reading of a source is a simplification, the page says so.