Preliminary Observations

So far, research into the Chinese calendar has mostly been undertaken by two independent families of historians: social sciences historians and historically-minded astronomers. The former have essentially focused their efforts on non-technical primary sources, often retrieved from archaeological excavations, and by using approaches typical of historical research: textual criticism, philology, chronology, social and intellectual history, notably. They have thus described the material aspect and the content of extant calendars, analyzed their cultural background, including their religious aspects, and tracked their modifications over long historical periods, taken advantage of their findings in order to solve difficult chronological puzzles, such as the dating of fragmentary manuscript calendars bearing no explicit indication of year. Despite the wide-ranging scope of their research, their attention to the smallest details and their interest in all sorts of issues raised by the history of the calendar, however, these historians have not often integrated calendrical calculations into their investigations.