Date on headstone

[roger]

Can someone please help me decipher the bottom line on this headstone, which I believe is a Chinese calendar date, and convert it to the Gregorian calendar date.



Thank you

[Henry]

Roger,

It looks like August 28, 1925.

Henry

[gckimm]

Hi roger:

If the date Henry translated above is according to the lunar calendar, the Gregorian calendar date would be October 15, 1925.

Incidentally, for those needing calendar conversion, there are now two ways to go about this. For those who are literate in Chinese or can at least figure out months, days, and years in Chinese, Chinese book stores often sell books that contain charts showing lunar dates and the corresponding Western calendar dates. If you can find one with a thousand years in it, that will be a great help in translating the dates in a genealogy. Of course, there are now many internet sites that provide calendar conversion. Most, though, like this one from the Hong Kong Observatory, www.hko.gov.hk/en/gts/time/conversion.htm, only seem to convert from the year 1900. This one goes back thousands of years: www.chinesecalendaronline.com/lunar-calendar/

The problem with the dates in genealogies is that the dates usually come in the traditional format, which may include the name of the emperor's reign, the year of the emperor's reign, and the "heavenly stems and earthly branches" marking the year's designation in the 60-year cycle of years. Sometimes you have only the emperor's reign name and the heavenly stems and earthly branches; sometimes you have only the heavenly stems and earthly branches, forcing you to choose from identical years spaced 60 years apart. For example, 2020, 1960, and 1900 are all known as the year 庚子 .

The best site that I have found for converting dates in a traditional format is the one from the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures (Taipei, Taiwan): sinocal.sinica.edu.tw/. However, this converter requires some knowledge of Chinese in order to use it, as you have to be able to choose the correct information from the correct pull-down menus and enter the correct numbers in the correct boxes.

Greg

[roger]

Thanks Henry and Greg.

That's a great write up on how to do the calendar conversions. The Chinese calendar is certainly complicated.

Greg, I'm sure that your explanation and references will be useful to others. Maybe you should copy that material and place it in a new post in the Software for Chinese Genealogy section so that it isn't lost in this post which will quickly drop down and disappear in this forum.