solar term · 節氣
Qingming 清明 — Clear and Bright
Qingming (清明), or Clear and Bright, is the fifth of the twenty-four solar terms — the moment the sun reaches 15° of celestial longitude — and the only one of the twenty-four that is also a festival, the day on which graves are swept.
The term, the festival, and how they came to share a day
Two things share this name, and almost every confusion about it starts there. One is a solar term: a fifteen-day segment of the year that opens when the sun reaches a fixed point, like the twenty-three others. The other is 清明节, the festival on which families visit and tend their ancestors' graves. They fall on the same day and they did not begin together, and the difference matters as soon as anyone asks what the words mean or when the day is.
In 2026 it falls on April 5, 2026, and in 2027 on April 5, 2027.
Take the solar term first, on its own terms. The classical definition below mentions no graves, no ancestors and no mourning of any kind. It cites the Guoyu on the eight winds, notes that the calendar singles out the Clear and Bright wind as the marker of the third month because that wind belongs to the trigram Xun, and concludes that by this point everything has become clean, orderly, clear and bright. The term is a statement about air and visibility after the spring rains — the sky washed, the growth unambiguous. That is the whole of it.
The festival arrived from two neighbours. Cold Food (寒食) fell just before it — counted at a hundred and five days after the winter solstice — and was kept by extinguishing all household fires and eating nothing cooked, in a story attached to the loyal retainer Jie Zitui, who was said to have burned to death rather than come out of a forest to accept a reward. Grave-visiting belonged to Cold Food, not to this term, and an eighth-century Tang edict formally sanctioned the practice at Cold Food rather than inventing it. The third neighbour was Shangsi (上巳), the third day of the third month, a day of purification by water and of walking out into the spring countryside. Over the Tang and Song the three dates converged, Cold Food faded, and the customs of all three settled onto the solar term that sat between them.
What remains is a festival with two moods that are not in conflict. One half is the tending of graves: clearing the plot, laying out food and wine, burning paper offerings, weighting fresh strips of paper onto the mound so that passers-by can see the dead are visited. The other half is the outing — kites, willow sprigs at the door, and the walk into the green that Shangsi contributed. In mainland China the day has been a statutory public holiday since 2008, the only solar term in the calendar that is one, and it is observed in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and across the Chinese diaspora.
The date behaves in a way that surprises people who know the other major festivals. Lunar New Year, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn are all lunisolar: they are fixed to a day of a lunar month, so they drift across several weeks of the Gregorian calendar. This one does not drift, because it is not a lunar date at all — it is a solar term, defined by the sun's position, and it therefore lands on April 4, 5 or 6 every single year. A festival whose date is stable in the Western calendar is the exception among Chinese festivals, and the reason is that it is a solar term wearing a festival's clothes.
Its three pentads are among the most heavily annotated in the source, and two of them contain claims worth reading twice. Tong trees begin to flower — and the passage first disambiguates three different trees that share the name, settling which one is meant, and then repeats the Piya's report that the tree keeps count of the calendar: twelve leaves to a branch, and thirteen in an intercalary year, so that the tree is in step with the qi of heaven and earth. Then the field mouse becomes a quail, read as a creature of yin transformed by yang at the height of its strength.
Then rainbows first appear, and that passage does two incompatible things in the space of a paragraph. It gives a genuinely optical account — thin cloud letting sunlight through, light striking raindrops, and a description of making a rainbow by spraying water toward the sun and looking along the flat of a sword. And then it records, carefully attributed and pointedly not endorsed, that people have said they saw a rainbow bend down into a stream to drink, its head like a donkey's; the author adds that perhaps such creatures do exist and the rainbow merely borrows the name. A tree that counts months and a rainbow that drinks sit in the same entry as a working theory of refraction, and the text does not appear to find that strange.
For a chart, this is one of the twelve sectional terms, and it opens the third month of the Chinese calendar's solar half: the dragon month. In 2026 a birth on April 4 sits in the rabbit month and a birth on April 5 sits in the dragon month, and the month pillar is one of the four pillars a reading is built from. The festival, for all its weight, changes nothing in the calculation. The sectional term underneath it changes a pillar.
What the classical text says
The four passages below are the entry for this term in Collected Explanations of the 72 Pentads — the definition, then the three pentads. The definition is the shortest of the four and is the one worth reading twice: it is the term without the festival.
清明，三月節。按《國語》曰：時有八風。歷獨指清明風為三月節，此風屬巽故也。萬物齊乎巽，物至此時皆以潔齊而清明矣。
Clear and Bright is the jie of the third month. According to the Guoyu: there are eight winds in the seasons. The calendar singles out the Clear and Bright wind as the jie of the third month, because this wind belongs to the trigram Xun. The ten thousand things reach fullness at Xun; by this time all things are clean, orderly, and clear and bright.
桐始華。桐，木名。有三種：華而不實者曰白桐，《爾雅》所謂榮桐木是也；皮青而結實者曰梧桐，一曰青桐，《淮南子》曰梧桐斷角是也；生于山岡、子大而有油者曰油桐，毛詩所謂梧桐不生山岡者是也。今始華者，乃白桐耳。按《埤雅》：桐木知日月、閏年，每一枝生十二葉，閏則十三葉，與天地合氣者也。今造琴瑟者，以花桐木，是知桐為白桐也。
Tong begins to flower. Tong is a tree. There are three kinds: the one that flowers but bears no fruit is called white tong; this is what the Erya calls "rong tong wood." The one with greenish bark that bears fruit is called wu tong, also called qing tong; this is what the Huainanzi refers to when it says "wu tong cuts off the horns." The one that grows on hillsides and ridges, whose seeds are large and yield oil, is called oil tong; this is what the Maoshi means when it says "wu tong does not grow on hillsides and ridges." What begins to flower now is the white tong.
According to the Piya: the tong tree knows the months, the days, and the intercalary years — each branch puts out twelve leaves, and in an intercalary year thirteen, so it is in harmony with the qi of heaven and earth. Those who today make zithers and lutes use hua tong wood, which confirms that the tong here is the white tong.
田鼠化為鴽【音如】。按《爾雅》註曰：鼫鼠，形大如鼠，頭似兔，尾有毛，青黃色，好在田中食粟豆，謂之田鼠。《本草》《素問》曰：鴽，鶉也，似鴿而小。《爾雅•釋鳥》：鴽，鴾母。郭註：{酓鳥}也，青州人呼為鴾母。鮑氏曰：鼠，陰類；鴽，陽類；陽氣盛故化為鴽，蓋陰為陽所化也。
The field mouse transforms into the ru (a quail-like bird; pronounced "ru"). According to the commentary in the Erya: the shi mouse is large, shaped like a mouse, with a rabbit-like head, a tufted tail, and a greenish-yellow color; it likes to live in fields and eat millet and beans, and is called the field mouse. The Bencao and the Suwen say: the ru is the quail, resembling a pigeon but smaller. The Erya, "Shi Niao" section, says: the ru is the mou-mu. Guo's commentary: it is the yan bird; people in Qingzhou call it the mou-mu. Bao says: the mouse belongs to the yin category; the ru belongs to the yang category; because yang qi is in full force, the mouse transforms into the ru — this is yin being transformed by yang.
虹始見【去聲】。虹，虹蜺也，詩所謂螮蝀，俗讀去聲也。註疏曰：是陰陽交會之氣，故先儒以為雲薄漏日，日照雨滴則虹生焉，今以水噀日，自劍視之則暈為虹。朱子曰：日與雨交，倏然成質，陰陽不當交而交者，天地淫氣也。虹為雄，色赤白，蜺為雌，色青白，然二字皆從蟲。《說文》曰：似螮蝀狀。諸書又云：嘗見虹入溪飲水，其首如驢。恐天地閒亦有此種物也，但虹氣似之借名也。
Rainbows begin to appear (read in the falling tone). A rainbow is a hong-ni — what the Shishi calls a didong — commonly read in the falling tone. The commentary and subcommentary say: it is the qi of yin and yang meeting, and so earlier scholars held that when cloud is thin and lets sunlight through, and sunlight strikes raindrops, a rainbow is produced. Today, if water is sprayed toward the sun and one looks from the side of a sword, a halo becomes a rainbow. Zhu Xi says: when sunlight and rain meet, something with form suddenly comes into being; yin and yang meeting when they ought not to is the dissolute qi of heaven and earth. The rainbow (hong) is male, its color red-white; the ni is female, its color blue-white. Both characters are written with the insect radical. The Shuowen says: its shape resembles that of a didong. Various other works further record that rainbows have been seen entering streams to drink, their heads like those of a donkey. It may be that such creatures do exist between heaven and earth, and the rainbow only borrows their name because its qi resembles them.
Collected Explanations of the 72 Pentads · 元 吳澄《月令七十二候集解》 · 維基文庫 · text retrieved 2026-07-30
The Chinese is reproduced as printed in that edition, including the modern punctuation its editors added. Interlinear notes in the original are the author's own. The English is our own translation, made for this archive.
Clear and Bright at fengshuiHQ
In the traditional calendar this term opens the third month, and it is the point where the calendar and the ritual year overlap rather than merely coincide — the only place in the twenty-four where a term carries a national observance. When a reader asks about "Qingming", the question is usually about the festival; when a calculator refers to it, it is always about the term. Both answers are correct and they are answers to different questions.
fengshuiHQ treats it as the term. The daily almanac at /huangli names it on the day it begins the way it names any other solar term, and there is no festival marking anywhere in the almanac — no holiday badge, nothing about graves, no change of tone. That is a deliberate limit rather than an oversight: the almanac reports the day's calendrical facts, and a family's observance is not one of them. What the day does change is the chart — the engine turns the month pillar here, exactly as it turns it at Awakening of Insects a month earlier and at Start of Summer a month later.
Related concepts
The month this term opens runs until Start of Summer; its middle term is Guyu (谷雨), the last term of spring. The month before it was opened by Jingzhe (惊蛰) and halved by Chunfen (春分). Cold Food and Shangsi, the two festivals this one absorbed, have no pages here. What has been written so far is on the Learn index.
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