Major Cold

Meaning

Major Cold, Dahan, is the twenty-fourth and last of the twenty-four solar terms: the Sun at 300°, about 20 January. Its name says “great cold”, and these are the deep, settled days of winter, the ground frozen hard and the rivers locked in ice. A northern saying holds that Minor Cold is colder than Major Cold, and the records often bear it out; but Major Cold is the cold of the year’s end, the last the old year has to give.

It is a principal term, the middle of the Ox month, and it names the twelfth lunar month. With it the circle of the terms closes: the next is Lichun, the Start of Spring, which opens the solar year again, and the lunar New Year falls in the month that follows, between 21 January and 20 February. The yang reborn at the winter solstice is still hidden under the frozen ground, but in Beijing the days are already about half an hour longer than at the solstice.

Its three pentads look past the cold: the hens begin to brood, the birds of prey fly high and fierce, and the waters and marshes freeze hard to the middle, the ice at its thickest just before it begins to give.

In practice

• In BaZi nothing turns at Major Cold: the month pillar stays the Ox month’s until Lichun, when the month and the year change together. A birth near it is no nearer a change of pillar, and a birth in the last days of January still takes the year pillar of the year before.
• In the Chinese calendar it names the twelfth lunar month, the last of the lunar year.
• The Calendar marks it on its day, with the Sun at 0° Aquarius, as the middle of the Ox month; astrology marks the same instant as the Sun’s entry into Aquarius.
• In Chinese astrology the month animal is the Ox until Lichun; the lunar New Year may already have come, and for a birth between it and Lichun Ulune gives both year animals and says which it reads.
• In Feng Shui the month’s star is the Ox month’s, and the year’s stars stay the old year’s until Lichun.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology the Sun enters Aquarius at this very moment, the second sign of winter in Western reckoning, as the Chinese winter draws to its close.
• In Japan daikan is the heart of kan, the cold season: the time of training in the cold, and of brewing sake, miso and soy sauce with the season’s cold water, said to keep best; in Korea it is daehan, and in Vietnam đại hàn.
• On Jeju Island, in Korea, the week from the fifth day after daehan to the third day before ipchun is singugan, when the household gods are said to be away in heaven, and families have long kept it for moving house and for repairs.

Origin and history

The Monthly Ordinances of the Book of Rites give the last month of winter its signs, the brooding hens, the birds of prey and the thickest ice, and order a great masked procession, the nuo, to clear away what remains of the old year, and an ox of earth to be brought out “to see off the cold air”: the ancestor of the clay spring ox that Song dynasty Kaifeng would whip at Lichun to urge on the farming year. The Huainanzi, in 139 BC, sets the term among the twenty-four.

In most years the weeks around Major Cold are the last of the lunar year, the weeks of getting ready for the New Year. At the Little New Year, on the twenty-third or twenty-fourth day of the twelfth lunar month, families see the Kitchen God off to heaven with sweets, so that he speaks well of them; the house is swept from top to bottom to clear out the year’s dust, the feast is bought in, and the red couplets are made ready to be pasted on the doors on New Year’s Eve.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes Major Cold as the instant the Sun’s apparent longitude reaches 300°, from its table of the solar terms computed with the Swiss Ephemeris for 1800 to 2200. As a principal term it changes no pillar; the Calendar shows it on the reader’s own date. In 2026 it fell on 20 January at 01:44 UT.

Correspondences