Grain Rain

Meaning

Grain Rain, Guyu, is the sixth of the twenty-four solar terms: the Sun at 30°, about 20 April. Its name is a promise: the rain that falls now makes the hundred grains grow, the seed sown in spring taking root in wet ground. It is the last term of spring, and the warmth of the coming summer can already be felt. In the north the last spring crops and the cotton go into the ground; in the south the rice seedlings grow thick in their nursery beds, ready to be planted out.

It is a principal term, the middle of the Dragon month, and it names the third lunar month. Its three pentads belong to ponds and mulberries: the duckweed begins to grow, the turtledove shakes its wings, and the hoopoe alights on the mulberry trees, where the silkworms are feeding.

Grain Rain has its flowers and its drink: tree peonies are called its flowers, blooming in the days around it, and the tea picked then, Guyu tea, is prized in the tea country of the south.

In practice

• In BaZi nothing turns at Grain Rain: the month pillar stays the Dragon month’s until Lixia. A birth near it is no nearer a change of pillar.
• In the Chinese calendar it names the third lunar month.
• The Calendar marks it on its day, with the Sun at 0° Taurus, as the middle of the Dragon month.
• In the zodiac and Feng Shui the month animal and the month’s star are those of the Dragon month, from Qingming to Lixia.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology the Sun enters Taurus at this very moment, an earth sign of fields and slow growth, as the Chinese calendar names its rain for the grain.
• In Japan kokuu comes less than a fortnight before the eighty-eighth night after Risshun, when the first tea of the year is picked; in Korea the finest green tea, ujeon, is the one picked before gogu.
• In Vietnam it is cốc vũ, the rain for the rice, at the same turn of the year.

Origin and history

The name is in the Huainanzi’s list of twenty-four, and the duckweed, the turtledove and the hoopoe in the old seasonal instructions. The Huainanzi also tells that when Cangjie invented writing, grain rained from the sky; in Shaanxi, his home county still holds a festival in his honour at Grain Rain, the rain of grain and the gift of writing remembered together.

Tea has its own history with the term. Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea, around 760, already says that tea is picked in the second, third and fourth months, and the tea of the days before and around Grain Rain became a mark of quality that growers still name. On the coast of Shandong, fishing villages hold their own Grain Rain rites, setting out to sea as the fish come back.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes Grain Rain as the instant the Sun’s apparent longitude reaches 30°, 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 April at 01:39 UT.

Correspondences