Hanlu occurs at celestial longitude 195°, around October 8-9. Morning dew is now distinctly cold; frost is close at hand. Deep autumn truly begins.
Tradition: chrysanthemum-viewing (賞菊), drinking chrysanthemum wine, climbing mountains for the Double Ninth Festival nearby. Climate: rapid cooling, especially in the north; warm clothes come out.
Hanlu (寒露 Hán Lù) is one of the few terms named for a sensation instead of an event, and it sits between Bailu and Shuangjiang in a run that tracks water vapour from condensing to freezing. Its three pentads, as the Collected Explanations assigns them, are the wild geese arriving as guests, sparrows entering the great water and becoming clams, and the chrysanthemum showing yellow flowers. The middle one preserves a classical idea of transformation between creatures, prompted by the resemblance between shell markings and sparrow plumage. It reads best today as a figure for an observed seasonal change, not a claim about biology.
As a node, Hanlu turns the month pillar over: the branch moves from You to Xu (戌) and autumn enters its final third. Xu holds Wu earth as its principal qi with Xin metal and Ding fire beneath, making it the storehouse of fire and one of the four storehouse branches alongside Chen, Chou and Wei. Compared with unmixed You, the Xu month is a far busier branch — earth generating metal, dry earth dimming fire, three forces in one place — so the first question is always which of them surfaces in the stems and which stays buried.
Reading Hanlu as simply colder dew than Bailu captures the surface and misses the substance. The two open different month pillars: You conceals Xin alone and its metal is clean, while Xu conceals Wu, Xin and Ding, earth-heavy with fire in storage. Moving from You to Xu is not only a drop in temperature but a shift from a simple branch to a compound one. A second confusion links Hanlu to the Double Ninth festival; that falls on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month and drifts against the solar date every year.
Births in the Xu month fall under what the tradition calls mixed qi. The Yuanhai Ziping and Sanming Tonghui line holds that wealth and officer stars in a storehouse want a clash or a punishment to open it before they can be used. Later Ziping writers largely rejected the blanket rule, arguing that what matters is whether a stem surfaces and whether a structure forms, with a clash helping or harming according to the whole chart. This is a genuine and unresolved split, and any verdict on a Xu-month chart is worth tracing back to the line it came from.
Xu has several standing positions. It closes the Yin–Wu–Xu fire trine as the storehouse; it pairs with Mao in a six-harmony traditionally said to produce fire; it clashes with Chen, storehouse against storehouse; and next to Shen and You it can join a run of metal. For a chart begun after Hanlu, the presence of Chen often makes the question of opening the storehouse decisive, while Yin or Wu lets fire draw support from the vault. These are structural facts; whether any of them is welcome depends on what the day master needs.
In farming terms Hanlu is a hinge — harvest handing over to autumn sowing in the north, late rice filling out in the south — and old manuals treat the cooling and rainfall of these weeks as setting the baseline for the following year's winter wheat. Traditional health writing turns inward here, favouring conservation over the outward, dispersing emphasis of spring and summer. These are descriptions of how the tradition organised the year, not medical guidance; anything concerning actual health belongs with a qualified practitioner.
On the surface, dew turning from cool to cold. In practice, a whole month pillar. Bailu falls at 165° and opens the You month, which conceals only Xin metal. Hanlu falls at 195° and opens Xu, which conceals Wu earth, Xin metal and Ding fire and acts as the storehouse of fire. The hidden stems differ, and so does everything that follows from them.
Yes — Hanlu is a node, and the branch moves from You to Xu when it arrives. Xu is one of the four storehouse branches and carries earth, metal and fire together, so the first task is to see which of the three surfaces in the heavenly stems and which stays hidden; that usually sets the direction of the reading. Xu is also dry earth, able both to generate metal and to dim fire.
It is the second pentad recorded for Hanlu in the Collected Explanations of the Seventy-Two Pentads. Observers saw sparrows thin out in late autumn while clams grew plentiful along the shore, and the banding on the shells resembled sparrow plumage, so the two were linked as a transformation. It reads now as a figurative record of a seasonal observation and as evidence of how classical writers drew images from nature, not as a biological claim.
The tradition disagrees with itself here. The Yuanhai Ziping and Sanming Tonghui line says storehouse contents need a clash to be released. Later Ziping writers rejected that as a general rule, holding that a surfacing stem and a viable structure matter more, and that a clash may help or harm depending on the chart as a whole. Both views remain in circulation, so it is worth asking which one a given verdict assumes.
No. The Double Ninth is fixed to the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, while Hanlu is the moment the sun reaches 195°, around 8–9 October. Their spacing shifts every year, sometimes close together and sometimes more than ten days apart. Climbing heights and viewing chrysanthemums belong to the festival; they are mentioned alongside Hanlu only because the two fall in the same stretch of autumn.