The first day of the tenth lunar month arrives like a door swinging open onto cold air. In the villages of Zhejiang's mountainous west, women are already at the outdoor stone stoves before sunrise, steam curling off vats of glutinous rice as they stir niàngjiǔ, 酿酒 — the winter rice wine that must be started now, the first day of the tenth month, or the fermentation will miss its window. You can smell it before you see it: sweet, yeasty, faintly alcoholic, drifting through alleys where the persimmons have gone soft and orange on the branches. This is not a famous festival with firecrackers and lanterns. The first day of the tenth lunar month, called shíyuè chūyī, 十月初一, is something quieter and arguably more intimate: the day the year turns its collar up against the wind.
In the old lunar calendar, this date sits at the hinge between autumn's last warmth and winter's first bite. The 24 Solar Terms have already passed Lìdōng, 立冬 (Beginning of Winter), by a few days in most years. Farmers have brought in the last of the cabbages. The cotton wadding has been beaten and aired. And households across northern and central China begin the annual ritual of bèidōng, 备冬 — preparing for winter — which is less a single event than a cluster of small, deeply practical traditions around clothing and the home.
Why Do People Air Their Quilts on the First Day of the Tenth Month?
Walk through a hútòng, 胡同, in Beijing's Dongcheng district on a bright early-November morning and you'll see them: quilts the color of dried persimmons and faded peonies, flung over courtyard walls and bamboo poles, their stitching catching the low sun. The air smells of cotton heated by sunlight — a dry, clean, faintly dusty scent that my neighbor Auntie Liu insists can only be achieved in the tenth month. "Sun in the ninth month is too strong," she told me once, thumping a quilt with a rattan beater. "It makes the cotton brittle. Tenth-month sun is gentle. It wakes the cotton up."
The logic is older than any of us. Before central heating and duvets, a Chinese winter was survived by miánbèi, 棉被 — quilts stuffed with cotton wadding, often hand-stitched by the women of the household in the weeks before cold set in. Cotton absorbs moisture through the humid autumn, and a damp quilt is a cold quilt. So the first clear days of the tenth month were for shàibèizi, 晒被子 — airing the bedding — and for tán miánhuā, 弹棉花, the rhythmic, almost musical fluffing of old cotton by a specialist with a bow-like tool. The tán sound — boing, boing, boing — was the soundtrack of late autumn in every northern town.
十月一，棉衣齐。
On the first of the tenth month, the padded clothes come out together.
— Northern Chinese folk saying
Notice what the proverb assumes: that everyone owned padded clothes, and that the date itself was the signal to wear them. In an era without weather apps, the lunar calendar was the weather app. The first day of the tenth month was the day you stopped pretending it was still autumn.
The Padded Jacket's Long Journey From Hemp to Silk-Cotton
China's relationship with winter clothing is a story of materials. Long before cotton became common in the Ming dynasty, the poor wore hè, 褐 — coarse hemp garments padded with silk floss waste, or with lúhuā, 芦花, reed catkins, which were famously useless in real cold. A classical tale, often attributed to the Confucian scholar Min Ziqian, describes a stepmother who stuffed her own sons' coats with warm silk floss but filled her stepson's with reed catkins — a cruelty exposed when the boy shivered while hauling a cart in the snow. The story is a moral fable, but the material detail is real: for centuries, what you wore in winter announced exactly how much your family could afford.
Cotton changed everything. By the late imperial period, mián'ǎo, 棉袄 — padded cotton jackets — were the standard winter garment from Shandong to Sichuan. They were thick, boxy, and quilted in grid patterns to keep the wadding from shifting. My first winter in Xi'an, I bought one from a market stall near the Bell Tower for the equivalent of a few dollars. It was the color of brick dust. It was the warmest piece of clothing I have ever owned. I wore it until the seams gave out.
The tailoring tradition that survives most vividly is in the qípáo, 旗袍, adapted for winter with a quilted lining, and the tángzhuāng, 唐装, the boxy jacket often worn at New Year with a mandarin collar and frog closures. In Suzhou, the silk workshops near Pingjiang Road still make winter qípáo lined with silk floss — a luxury version of the same principle that kept farmers alive.
Scrubbing the Kitchen, Sealing the Windows: The Household Half of Winter Prep
Clothing is only half of bèidōng. The other half happens indoors, and it smells like vinegar, woodsmoke, and hot lard.
The first day of the tenth month is, in many regional traditions, a day for sǎo zào, 扫灶 — sweeping the stove and kitchen. The traditional festival calendar places the more famous kitchen-cleaning custom at the Little New Year (Xiǎonián, 小年) in the twelfth month, when the Kitchen God is sent up to heaven. But in parts of Henan and Shanxi, households begin the deeper winter scrub now: pulling the stove apart, scraping soot from the chimney, re-plastering cracks in the kàng, 炕 — the heated brick sleeping platform of the north — with mud mixed with chopped straw. If the kàng cracks in January, you do not sleep; you freeze. So October is when the mortar comes out.
Windows get sealed too. In old Beijing courtyard homes, paper windows were pasted over with new chuānghu zhǐ, 窗户纸, and the gaps around the frames were packed with cloth strips. The result was a house that went dark and quiet and close — a sealed box against the wind, smelling of paper, coal, and cabbage. Anyone who has spent a winter in a northern village knows that particular smell: the fermented tang of suāncài, 酸菜, pickled cabbage, in the cellar, mingling with coal smoke and the dry warmth of the kàng.
The Cabbage Cellar
Speaking of cabbage. In the northeast — Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning — the first days of the tenth month coincide with the great cāng báicài, 藏白菜, cabbage-storing operation. Hundreds of heads of napa cabbage are laid out on balconies and courtyard walls to dry, then stacked in cellars or buried under straw, or pickled into suāncài in enormous ceramic crocks weighted down with river stones. Families used to buy cabbage by the jīn, 斤 (half-kilo), in the hundreds. Children were enlisted to haul it. The whole neighborhood smelled of cabbage and cold earth.
What Winter Wine Has to Do With the First Day of the Tenth Month
Back to the steaming vats in Zhejiang. The custom of brewing dōngniàngjiǔ, 冬酿酒 — winter-brewed rice wine — is tied to the lunar calendar in a way that rewards precision. In Shaoxing, the most famous rice-wine town in China, the brewing season traditionally opens after the Lìdōng solar term and peaks around the tenth month. Brew too early and the heat spoils the ferment; too late and the cold stalls it. The first day of the tenth month sits in the sweet spot.
The process is simple enough to describe and hard to perfect. Glutinous rice is steamed until translucent, spread out to cool, mixed with qū, 曲 — a starter culture of mold and yeast pressed into cakes — and packed into earthenware jars with water. Then it sits. The jar breathes. The liquid turns cloudy and sweet, then clearer and stronger. By the New Year, it is ready to be warmed in a small pewter pot and poured for guests.
My first attempt, in a Hangzhou kitchen, produced something that tasted like sweet porridge that had been left out too long. I drank it anyway. The second year was better. The point is not perfection — it is the doing of it in the right week, with the right weather outside the window.
Reading the Day Itself: What the Almanac Says About Getting Ready
Traditional households still consult the huánglì, 黄历 — the daily almanac — before big household tasks, and the entries are specific. Today's almanac, for instance, lists "Install Door" and "Hang Signboard" among the favorable activities, which fits the spirit of winter prep: sealing and securing the house. It advises against "Tailoring" and "Open Granary" on this particular day, which would give a traditional seamstress pause before starting a winter coat, and a farmer pause before selling grain. These are not predictions; they are a cultural grammar of timing, a way of making the practical feel ordered.
If you're curious how the almanac works, the Chinese Almanac Today page lays out the daily entries, and the Lucky Day Finder lets you look up dates in the same system. Many families still pick their moving day or their shop-opening day by the same grammar. The Best Moving Dates page shows how it's applied to one of life's biggest transitions — a fitting thing to think about in the season of moving the household into winter mode.
The Cold on Your Skin, the Warmth in Your Hands
The other morning I stood in a courtyard in Shanxi, watching a woman named Zhang Xiulan re-plaster a crack in her kàng. Her hands were red with cold. The mud was grey and gritty and smelled of wet earth and straw. She worked it into the seam with her thumbs, smoothing it, pressing down, then sat back and looked at it the way a painter looks at a canvas.
"Every year the same crack," she said. "Every year I fix it. If I don't fix it, the winter gets in."
That is the whole tradition, really. Not a festival with a name you'd find on a postcard, but a thousand small acts of repair and preparation, performed on a date the calendar marks and the body already knows. The quilts are on the wall. The cabbage is in the cellar. The wine is breathing in its jar. The crack is filled, for now.
Winter is coming. The house is ready. And somewhere, faintly, you can still hear the boing, boing of the cotton fluffer's bow.
This article is based on traditional Chinese calendrical systems and historical texts, provided for cultural learning and reference purposes only.