Lichun (立春) — Beginning of Spring

Lichun falls when the sun reaches celestial longitude 315°, around February 3-5 each year. In the I-Ching almanac and Bazi (Four Pillars) systems, this — not the Lunar New Year — is the true start of the new year and the new "year pillar" for fate calculation.

Traditional folklore: villagers welcomed spring with the "spring ox" ceremony; eating spring rolls and chunbing (春餅) is still common. Climate notes: temperatures begin rising but cold spells are common. Yang qi awakens; wood element strengthens.

The earliest surviving list of all twenty-four terms appears in the Han-dynasty Huainanzi, in its chapter on celestial patterns, where Lichun heads the sequence. The pentad commentary traditionally ascribed to the Yuan scholar Wu Cheng, Yueling Qishi'er Hou Jijie (月令七十二候集解) glosses the character li (立) as establishing or beginning, and subdivides Lichun into three five-day pentads: east winds thawing the frozen ground, hibernating creatures beginning to stir, and fish rising toward the thinning ice. These images record the agricultural year of the middle and lower Yellow River valley, not of China as a whole.

For Bazi practice, Lichun is the moment two pillars turn over at once: the year pillar takes the incoming stem-branch, and the month establishment shifts from the Ox month to the Tiger month (寅 yín). Anyone born on the day of Lichun has to be checked against the exact minute of the transition, because an hour either way rewrites both pillars, reverses the direction in which luck periods are counted, and changes the age at which they begin. The traditional three-days-to-one-year count runs from the birth moment to the nearest major term (節 jié), never to a mid-term.

A persistent misunderstanding treats the solar terms as part of the lunar calendar. They are not. Each term is fixed by the sun's position along the ecliptic, which makes the whole set a solar component embedded inside a lunisolar system. That is why Lichun barely moves against the Gregorian calendar, while Lunar New Year drifts across a full month, from late January to late February. When the two happen to coincide it is coincidence, not design. One boundary confusion causes more trouble than any other: Bazi counts months by solar terms, while Ziwei Doushu (紫微斗數 Zǐwēi Dǒushù) builds its chart from lunar months and lunar days. Someone born after Lichun but before the first day of the first lunar month already carries the new year pillar in their Four Pillars, yet still belongs to the outgoing year on their Purple Star chart. Two calendars, two conventions; a mismatch between them is expected, not evidence of an error in the casting.

Tradition does not speak with one voice about where the year actually begins. The Ziping lineage settles on Lichun and that has become the dominant convention, but some practitioners have argued for the first day of the first lunar month, and others for the winter solstice, when the first yang line returns. Calendrical method shifted as well: for most of imperial history the terms were spaced by equal intervals of time, and only in the early Qing did official astronomy adopt equal arcs of 15° along the ecliptic, so the exact clock time of Lichun in an older source will not match a modern ephemeris.

Structurally, Lichun opens the four establishing terms and is the first of the twelve major terms. Its relationship with Yushui, a fortnight later, is a division of labour: a major term moves the month pillar, while a mid-term merely marks the middle of that month and moves nothing at all. In the sovereign-hexagram scheme that pairs one hexagram with each month, the Tiger month takes Tai (泰), three yang lines rising beneath three yin, which is where the folk phrase about three yang bringing prosperity comes from.