solar term · 節氣
Yushui 雨水 — Rain Water
Yushui (雨水), or Rain Water, is the second of the twenty-four solar terms — the moment the sun reaches 330° of celestial longitude, and the point at which winter's precipitation is expected to arrive as rain rather than as snow.
What Rain Water marks, and what it leaves alone
Rain Water makes a claim about the form of precipitation, not its quantity. Nothing about this term promises more rain than the fortnight before it; what it marks is the threshold at which what falls from the sky is expected to stay liquid on the way down and on the ground. The classical definition below puts it as a consequence of the term before: once the east wind has thawed the freeze, the ice disperses and becomes rain and water. The thaw is the event. The rain is what the thaw looks like.
In 2026 it falls on February 18, 2026, and in 2027 on February 19, 2027. Like every solar term it is fixed to the sun's position rather than to a count of days, so the date moves by a day at most from year to year.
The reason it sits second rather than anywhere else is an argument from the five phases, and the classical text makes it explicitly: spring belongs to wood, and what gives birth to wood is water — so the term that waters the season follows immediately after the season opens. That is a statement about order, not about weather. It explains why this term is here and not in the fifth position; it does not predict that a particular February afternoon will be wet.
Its three pentads read as a sequence of observations moving outward from the water. In the first, otters lay out the fish they have caught in a ring on the bank, which the text reads as an offering and takes as evidence that fish have begun moving upstream again. In the second, the wild geese turn north. In the third, plants and trees bud and stir — the last of the three, because the ground is the slowest thing in the landscape to register a change of season.
What Rain Water does not do is move anything in a chart. The twenty-four terms alternate between two kinds: twelve sectional terms, which open the twelve months of the Chinese calendar's solar half, and twelve middle terms, which sit in the middle of a month already underway. Start of Spring is sectional and opens the tiger month; Rain Water is a middle term and falls inside it. A birthday on either side of Rain Water carries the same month pillar, and the day the term begins is not a boundary anyone crosses.
It does, however, have a job in the lunisolar calendar — and a well-known rule of thumb that is very nearly a law. The lunar month containing Rain Water is, in almost every year, the first lunar month, which makes this term a handy way to locate the lunar new year without computing it. Almost every year is not every year: the calendar's real anchor is the winter solstice and the placement of leap months around it, and over the two centuries from 1900 to 2100 the rule fails three times — in 1985, 2034 and 2053, when the lunar new year arrives after Rain Water rather than before it and the term falls in the twelfth month of the old year instead.
Practically, the term arrives while it is still cold in most of the country, which is why it reads as a threshold rather than a description. The traditional reading of it is agricultural and forward-looking: the ground is beginning to accept water again, and the work that depends on soft ground can be planned.
What the classical text says
The four passages below are the entry for Rain Water in Collected Explanations of the 72 Pentads — the paragraph defining the term, then the three five-day pentads that divide it.
雨【去聲】水，正月中。天一生水，春始屬木，然生木者，必水也，故立春後繼之雨水，且東風既解凍，則散而為雨水矣。
Rain Water is the middle solar term of the first month. Heaven and one give birth to water; spring fundamentally belongs to wood, yet what gives birth to wood is necessarily water — hence Rain Water follows immediately after the Start of Spring. Moreover, once the east wind has thawed the freeze, it disperses and becomes rain and water.
獺祭魚。獺，一名水狗，賊魚者也。祭魚，取魚以祭天也。所謂豺獺知報本，歲始而魚上遊，則獺初取以祭。徐氏曰：獺祭圓鋪，圓者，水象也；豺祭方鋪，方者，金象也。
Otters make offerings of fish. The otter, also called "water dog," preys on fish. Making offerings of fish means taking fish to offer to heaven. It is said that jackals and otters know how to honor their origin: at the start of the year, when fish begin to swim upstream, otters first catch them and offer them up. Xu says: when an otter lays out its offering, it arranges the fish in a circle — the circle being the image of water; when a jackal lays out its offering, it arranges the prey in a square — the square being the image of metal.
候鴈北【《月令》、《漢書》作鴻鴈北】。鴈，知時之鳥。熱歸塞北，寒來江南，沙漠乃其居也。孟春陽氣既達，候鴈自彭蠡而北矣。
Wild geese head north (the Yueling and Hanshu write this as "great wild geese head north"). The wild goose is a bird that knows the seasons. When it is hot, it returns to the northern frontier; when it is cold, it comes south to the Yangtze region — the desert wastes are its home. In the first month of spring, when the yang energy has spread through, the wild geese fly north from Pengli.
草木萌動。天地之氣交而為泰，故草木萌生發動矣。
Plants and trees begin to bud and stir. The qi of heaven and earth mingle and form a state of tai, and so plants and trees begin to sprout and put forth growth.
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.
Rain Water at fengshuiHQ
In the traditional calendar Rain Water is the middle term of the first month, and its customs are domestic rather than ceremonial. In parts of Sichuan the day belongs to married daughters, who take gifts back to their parents' house — a covered pot of stewed meat is the traditional one. There is no festival attached to this term and no public observance; it is a date in the farming year that a few regions kept as a family one.
In fengshuiHQ, the term surfaces on exactly one day. The daily almanac at /huangli carries a solar-term line at the top of the card — the hanzi and its English rendering — on the day a term begins, and only then; the next day's almanac does not carry it. Behind that, the month pillar shown in a chart is unchanged by this term, because it is a middle term: the pillar turned at Start of Spring and will not turn again until Awakening of Insects.
Related concepts
The term before this one is Lichun (立春), which opens the year; the term after it is Jingzhe (惊蛰), which opens the second month. The distinction between sectional and middle terms, and the leap-month rule that depends on it, are calendar concepts without pages of their own yet — the ones that do exist are listed on the Learn index.
See today's almanac
On the day Rain Water begins, the almanac names it at the top of the day's card.
the daily almanac →