Yushui occurs at celestial longitude 330°, around February 18-20. Snow gives way to rain across most of China; rivers and groundwater begin replenishing. Spring planting preparation begins in southern regions.
Folk customs include "filial visits" — daughters bringing gifts to parents. Health note: cold-warm transitions stress the spleen and stomach; traditional Chinese medicine recommends warm congee and avoiding raw cold foods.
The twenty-four terms are not a flat list. They alternate between twelve major terms (節 jié) and twelve mid-terms (氣 qì), and Yushui belongs to the second group — it is the mid-term of the Tiger month. That status settles its role in fate calculation: major terms move the month pillar, mid-terms do not. The whole stretch from Lichun to Jingzhe is Tiger month, and Yushui only signals that the stretch has reached its midpoint. Confusing the two categories is one of the commonest ways beginners end up with the wrong month pillar. Mid-terms carry a second, purely calendrical job. The lunisolar calendar inserts an intercalary month by a no-mid-term rule: any lunation containing no mid-term at all becomes a leap month and repeats the previous month's number. Yushui is one of the twelve mid-terms used in that test. So although it moves no pillar, it helps decide how lunar months are numbered — and lunar months are precisely what a Ziwei Doushu chart is built from.
The name does not promise rain. It describes a shift in the form precipitation takes, from snow toward rain, together with a general rise in atmospheric moisture. North China may still see snowfall during Yushui, while the far south has long since entered its wet season. The vocabulary was generalised from Yellow River conditions; applied across a country spanning dozens of degrees of latitude it works as a seasonal marker and fails as a forecast.
Otters lay out their catch along the bank, which classical writers read as the first stir of spring water; wild geese return northward; grasses and trees push out new shoots. Those are the three phases the Yuan-dynasty pentad commentary assigns to Yushui, and the sequence moves from water to sky to ground, which is characteristic of how the old almanacs timed the year: by watching what animals and plants did, not by measuring anything.
Read in a chart, Yushui says less about rain than about how deep into the Tiger month a birth falls. The doctrine of hidden stems on duty gives each month's concealed stems a run of days in turn; the Tiger branch hides Jia wood, Bing fire and Wu earth, and on the common arrangement Yushui sits near the handover from fire to wood, after which wood is formally in season. The climate-adjusting school adds that a first-month birth still carries residual winter cold and benefits from visible Bing fire — an emphasis at its strongest around Yushui.
The order of Yushui and Jingzhe was not always what it is now. In earlier calendrical systems Jingzhe — then called Qizhe (啟蟄) — stood before Yushui, and only later was the sequence fixed as Lichun, Yushui, Jingzhe, Chunfen. Rearrangements like this are a reminder that the twenty-four terms were not handed down complete. They settled into their present shape over centuries of calendar reform, so a discrepancy between an old text and a modern almanac is not automatically a copying error.
No. Yushui is a mid-term, not a major term. In Bazi the month pillar turns only at major terms: the Tiger month starts at Lichun and runs until Jingzhe, when it becomes the Rabbit month. Yushui simply marks the midpoint of that span and changes neither the year nor the month pillar. Lichun, Jingzhe and Qingming are the kind of term that moves a pillar; mid-terms govern seasonal depth and the leap-month rule instead.
The lunisolar calendar declares any lunation that contains no mid-term to be an intercalary month, repeating the previous month's number — hence a leap fourth month, a leap sixth month, and so on. Yushui is one of the twelve mid-terms used in that test. The rule uses the sun's position to correct the drift that builds up between lunar months and the solar year, keeping calendar months aligned with the seasons.
Not necessarily. Solar term names summarise a seasonal tendency instead of forecasting a particular day, and they were generalised from the climate of the Yellow River basin. Yushui describes precipitation shifting from snow toward rain, with moisture increasing overall. Northern China can still see snow in this period, while the far south may already be well into its rainy season.