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The calendar, because it depends upon regnal dating, can be broken into two general periods: |
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The legendary, from 2674 to 1385 B.C., in which years are reckoned according to the reigns of clan leaders or emperors who are mythical or legendary. |
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The historical, from 1384 B.C. to the present. For this period, records exist to indicate the reigns of actual individuals. |
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It should be noted that the Republic of China abolished certain usages in the calendar with its accession in A.D. 1912. The tradition of the nien hao was abolished at that time. The Republic also began using the Gregorian calendar for official business. Thus, although the Republic did not abolish the Chinese calendar, it ended the period of its official use. The Chinese calendar continues to be used by millions of people for determining the dates of festivals, Chinese astrological and divinatory practice, and other applications. Chinese scholarly tradition uses the year 1912 as a new epoch for the Chinese calendar, counting 1912 as year 1 of the Republic. The Republic can be thought of, therefore, as a continuation of earlier Chinese dynastic tradition, in which the Republic simply constitutes another dynasty, for the purposes of calendric year dating. |
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9.10.2.2. 9.10.2.4
Code on CD-ROM |
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See the SCDTL text on the CD for the discussion of the code. |
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Most calendars succeed, in the sense that they are accepted by and serve the needs of the society that produced them. Calendars fall into disuse only when they are reformed, or when the political entity that sustains them disappears. |
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Some calendars, however, are discarded soon after they are implemented because they are unworkable or unsatisfactory in some way. |
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Why do calendars fail? The great bulk of our knowledge about calendars focuses on calendric successes, since the failures do not, by definition, last very long, and therefore leave little evidence of their existence. It logically follows that any detailed evidence would come from recent historical times, when more detailed written records were kept and are still available. |
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In this section, I consider some calendars that may reasonably be called failures. The French Revolutionary Calendar (FRC) is the oldest modern calendric failure for which there are records. The Russian Soviet calendar system(s) of October 1929 to June 1940 can also be considered a failed calendar. |
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