I arrived at the Temple of the Eastern Peak in suburban Beijing just as the first biānpào, 鞭炮, firecrackers cracked the dawn. It was the 22nd day of the third lunar month — a day marked "Remove" on the almanac, a day for sweeping, for letting go. The air smelled of burnt gunpowder and pine smoke, and somewhere behind the main hall, a monk was chanting in a low, steady drone that vibrated through the flagstones under my feet.
This temple fair, known locally as a miàohuì, 庙会, was not the grand spectacle of Lunar New Year. There were no dragon dancers, no mountain of red lanterns. This was a smaller, quieter affair — a late-spring gathering that felt more like a village breathing out after a long winter. And yet, as I watched an elderly woman carefully burn paper offerings at a side altar, I realized I was witnessing something the big festivals never show: the intimate, daily conversation between Chinese people and their Chinese almanac.
The Day the Calendar Told Us to Clean House
Today's almanac entry reads: Good for: Worship, Repair Grave, Remove Mourning, Boat Travel, Road Repair, Release Animals, Medical Treatment, Bath, Sweep House, Clean & Renew, Treat Illness. The common thread is removal. The day stem is Ren, 壬, and the branch is Wu, 午 — together forming the Heavenly Water of Willow Wood. It is a day of cleansing, not of building. You do not marry today. You do not break ground. You do not sign contracts. You sweep.
At the temple fair, this theme played out in the rituals I watched. A middle-aged man knelt before a small furnace, feeding it with strips of yellow paper inscribed with the names of ancestors. The fire licked the characters into ash, and the ash rose into the branches of a gnarled locust tree. "This is sòng zǔxiān, 送祖先," his wife explained, seeing my curiosity. "Sending the ancestors back after Qingming. Today is a good day for it — the calendar says 'remove mourning.'"
I had never thought of mourning as something you could time. But here, the 24 solar terms and the almanac's daily advice worked in tandem: Qingming, the clear-and-bright festival of tomb sweeping, had passed nearly a month ago. Today, on this specific "Remove" day, families in rural Hebei and Shandong perform a closing ritual — a final farewell until next spring.
Why Do Temple Fairs Cluster Around "Remove" Days?
The Jiànchú, 建除, system of twelve daily officers is one of the oldest layers of Chinese calendrical science, dating back to the Han dynasty. Each day carries one of twelve labels: Establish, Remove, Fill, Balance, and so on. "Remove" days are considered auspicious for ending things — debts, illnesses, mourning periods, even bad habits.
Temple fairs naturally gravitate toward these dates. In the village of Cuandixia, 爨底下, a Ming-dynasty settlement tucked into the mountains west of Beijing, the spring temple fair has been held on the nearest "Remove" day to the third-month full moon for at least four centuries. I visited once in early April, when the mountain peaches were just beginning to blush. The fair occupied a single cobbled lane between stone houses, and the centerpiece was a troupe of yānggē, 秧歌, dancers — farmers in bright silk costumes who stomped and twirled to the rhythm of waist drums.
"We dance the old dances," the lead drummer told me, wiping sweat from his forehead. His name was Old Zhang, and he had been leading the yānggē troupe for thirty-two years. "When I was a boy, my grandfather said the dancing chases away the bad qì from winter. Today is a 'remove' day — perfect for it."
He offered me a piece of huāshēng táng, 花生糖, peanut brittle studded with sesame seeds, still warm from a vendor's wok. The sugar stuck to my teeth. The drumming vibrated up through the cobblestones. I understood, in that moment, why the calendar matters here: it gives ordinary actions — eating, dancing, burning paper — a cosmic significance.
The Taste of Farewell: Zongzi in Late Spring
One vendor at the temple fair was selling something I did not expect: zòngzi, 粽子, the pyramid-shaped glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves. I associate zongzi with the Dragon Boat Festival in early summer, but here they were, steaming in a bamboo basket, their leaves still a vivid, wet green.
"These are for the ancestors," the vendor, a woman named Auntie Chen, said as she untied a dumpling for me. She used ruòzhú, 箬竹, leaves — broad and fragrant — and filled the rice with red dates and a single candied kumquat. "The sweet ones are for sending off. The salty ones with pork — those are for eating."
The preparation was simple but precise: glutinous rice soaked overnight, drained, then mixed with a pinch of salt and a spoonful of lard. The leaves were folded into cones, filled, and tied with cotton string in a crisscross pattern that Auntie Chen said "keeps the spirits from getting lost." She boiled them for three hours over a coal fire, and the steam carried the scent of bamboo and sticky rice across the entire temple courtyard.
Eating one, I understood the difference between a festival zongzi and a ritual zongzi. The festival version is celebratory — loud, salty, shared among the living. This one was quiet, sweet, and slightly cold by the time I bit into it. It tasted of memory.
Where the Smoke Goes: A Ritual in Three Acts
By mid-morning, the temple courtyard had filled with a haze of incense smoke so thick it caught in my throat. I watched a family perform what is called shàngxiāng, 上香, the offering of incense, in three distinct movements.
First, the grandmother lit a bundle of sandalwood sticks, holding them with both hands — always both hands — and bowed three times toward the main hall. The smoke rose straight up in the still air, then dispersed sideways as a breeze caught it. "Good," her daughter murmured. "The ancestors are accepting."
Second, they placed bowls of fruit — apples for peace, oranges for wealth, a single pomegranate for fertility — on a low stone table in front of the incense burner. The pomegranate had been cut open, its seeds gleaming like rubies in the morning light.
Third, they burned paper money in a small brick furnace, feeding it sheet by sheet so the flames never died. The paper curled and blackened, and the heat pressed against my face. A young boy, maybe seven years old, was allowed to drop the last sheet. His mother guided his hand. "Now say goodbye to great-grandfather," she said. He whispered something I could not hear, and the paper turned to ash.
This is what a "Remove" day looks like. Not dramatic. Not loud. Just a family, a furnace, and the slow, patient work of letting go.
A Poem for the Season: What the Tang Poets Knew
Later, I sat on a stone bench and pulled out my notebook. A Tang dynasty poet named Wang Wei, 王维, wrote a poem called "Sòng Bié", 送别, "Seeing Someone Off," that has always reminded me of these late-spring temple fairs:
下山白云合，
Xià shān bái yún hé,
The white clouds close behind the mountain path,
日暮苍山远。
Rì mù cāng shān yuǎn.
At dusk, the green hills stretch far away.
请君试问东流水，
Qǐng jūn shì wèn dōng liú shuǐ,
Ask the eastward-flowing river, if you will,
别意与之谁短长。
Bié yì yǔ zhī shuí duǎn cháng.
Whether parting feelings are shorter or longer.
Wang Wei understood something about Chinese ritual that the almanac encodes in its daily advice: that parting is a skill, not a sorrow. The "Remove" day teaches you how to say goodbye — to the dead, to the season, to the version of yourself that wore a winter coat. The smoke from the incense, the ash from the paper, the steam from the zongzi — all of it rises and disperses, and you are left standing in a temple courtyard, watching the clouds close behind the mountain.
The Last Hour: When the Vendors Pack Up
By late afternoon, the temple fair was winding down. The drummers had packed their instruments into padded cloth bags. Auntie Chen's zongzi basket was empty except for a few stray bamboo leaves. The monk had stopped chanting, and the only sound was the wind in the cypress trees and the occasional crackle of a dying incense stick.
I watched an old man sweep the courtyard. He used a broom made of bound twigs — tiáo zhou, 笤帚 — and moved in slow, deliberate arcs. He was sweeping away the day's debris: crumpled paper, peanut shells, ash. But I knew, because the almanac had told me, that he was also sweeping away something else. The bad qì. The lingering attachments. The winter that had overstayed its welcome.
He looked up and caught my eye. "Tomorrow is a 'Balance' day," he said. "Good for starting things." He smiled, revealing a gold tooth. "But today — today we clean."
I walked out through the temple gate, past the stone lions, past the last vendor folding his tarpaulin. The sun was low, casting long shadows across the dirt path. Somewhere behind me, a single firecracker popped — a final farewell. The air smelled of dust and pine and the faint, sweet ghost of steamed rice.
I have lived in China for over a decade, and I still do not fully understand the almanac. But days like this — days marked "Remove," when the whole world seems to exhale — I stop trying to understand. I just watch the smoke rise, and I let it go.
This article is based on traditional Chinese calendrical systems and historical texts, provided for cultural learning and reference purposes only.