When is Chinese New Year?

Chinese New Year 2006 will be on January 29, which will be the beginning of a year of the dog. This means that most of January 2006 is still part of the year of the rooster.

The first day of each Chinese year will always fall sometime between January 21 and February 21, inclusive. The traditional Chinese calendar is lunisolar, like the Hebrew calendar but unlike the Western (Gregorian) solar calendar or the Islamic lunar calendar.

This section of the site lists every Chinese New Year for one thousand years, starting in 1645, when Jesuit missionaries completed an important reform of the Chinese calendar. I've included the corresponding animal of the Chinese zodiac -- rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, or pig -- for each year.

For further information, see Helmer Aslaksen's site on the Chinese calendar, from which the data in this section were derived (with permission).