I remember the first time I stumbled into a temple fair during the fourth lunar month. It was a damp Tuesday in Sichuan, and I had no business being there. The almanac on my phone blinked with warnings: Establish Day — Unlucky. Black Road day. Heavenly Punishment. Every digital signpost screamed stay home. But the old woman selling mianhua tang (棉花糖, cotton candy) from a bicycle cart just laughed when I showed her. "That's for grave-digging and lawsuits," she said, handing me a puff of sugar the size of my head. "We're here to burn incense and watch the stilt-walkers. That's different."
She was right, of course. On the lunar calendar, the 16th day of the fourth month—today, June 1, 2026, the Year of the Fire Horse under the Pillars Bing-Wu / Jia-Wu / Bing-Wu—is a day the old texts call a Establish Day (建日), traditionally unlucky for beginnings. But try telling that to the thousands of people who flood into temple grounds across China this month. They come bearing incense sticks, plastic stools, and grandchildren. They come to worship, to trade, to eat, and to watch men on five-foot stilts pretend to trip over each other. This is the miaohui (庙会, temple fair) season, and it operates on a logic older than any almanac.
The Lunar Calendar’s Quietest Season
The fourth month of the Chinese lunar calendar is a strange, suspended time. Spring planting is done; the summer harvest has not yet begun. The air grows thick and wet, and the 24 Solar Terms slide from Grain Rain (谷雨) into Start of Summer (立夏). It is a breather, a gap between labors. And in that gap, the temple fairs bloom.
Walk into any sizable temple fair in the fourth month—say, the Miaofengshan Temple Fair (妙峰山庙会) outside Beijing, or the smaller, fiercer fairs in rural Shanxi—and you will feel it before you see it: the heat of bodies pressed together, the snap of oil in wok after wok, the low thrum of a thousand conversations layered over temple bells. The air is gray with incense smoke that catches in your throat and coats your clothes. By noon, your jacket will smell like a temple for three days.
Vendors line the stone paths that lead up the mountain or through the village square. Some sell tanghulu (糖葫芦)—hawthorn berries glazed in a brittle shell of caramelized sugar that shatters between your teeth with a sound like breaking ice. Others work portable griddles, pouring batter in thin spirals to make jianbing (煎饼), the savory crepes that Chinese eaters have perfected over centuries. The smell of bean paste and scallions mingles with the sweet rot of overripe mangoes from a fruit stall. Everything is loud. Everything is bright. The colors—red lanterns, gold foil, green bamboo—seem to vibrate in the humid air.
At the center of it all, past the fortune-tellers and the calligraphers and the woman selling wooden hair combs, is the temple itself. Inside, incense sticks burn in bundles thick as a child’s wrist, their smoke curling up toward painted beams where dragons and phoenixes have faded to ghosts of themselves. Devotees bow three times, palms pressed together, foreheads dipped. Some ask for health. Some for money. Some just stand there, letting the smoke wash over them like water.
Why Do Village Troupes Still Walk on Stilts After 2,000 Years?
No temple fair in the fourth month is complete without the caigaoqiao (踩高跷, stilt-walking). I have watched these performances in a dozen provinces, and I still do not fully understand why they work. Why does a grown man strapped to wooden legs twice his height, wobbling through a dirt square in full opera makeup, make an entire crowd hold its breath?
The performers are usually local farmers or construction workers—men (and occasionally women) with calloused hands and quiet voices. But when they strap on the stilts, they become generals, demons, monkeys, brides. The stilts themselves are painted in layers of red and gold lacquer, lashed to the calves with strips of cloth. The walkers move in a strange, syncopated rhythm: thump-thump-shuffle, thump-thump-shuffle, the wooden feet striking packed earth with a sound like a drum.
In Henan province, I watched a man in his sixties—his face a mask of white greasepaint and black whiskers—pretend to fall off his stilts into the crowd. The children screamed. The adults laughed. He caught himself at the last second, one hand on the shoulder of a vendor’s awning, and winked at a toddler who was crying from the shock. The toddler stopped. Everyone cheered. It was not theater in any conventional sense; it was chaos held together by muscle memory and a community’s collective goodwill.
The historical roots of stilt-walking go back to the Warring States period, when performers used them to mimic giants in shamanic rites. Over centuries, the practice was absorbed into temple fairs as a form of offering to the gods—a display of human skill and devotion that pleases the deities who watch from above. On an Establish Day marked by the Heavenly Punishment star, a day considered unstable by the almanac, the stilts become a kind of defiance: we will wobble, we might fall, but we do it anyway, and the gods will smile.
The Taste of the Fourth Month: Zongzi Before the Festival
Ask any Chinese grandmother what the fourth month tastes like, and she will say zongzi (粽子)—the pyramid-shaped packets of glutinous rice wrapped in bamboo leaves. Technically, zongzi belong to the Dragon Boat Festival (Duanwu, 端午节), which falls on the 5th day of the 5th lunar month. But preparations begin weeks earlier, and by the 16th of the fourth month, the scent of boiling bamboo leaves has already colonized every kitchen from Guangzhou to Harbin.
I learned to make zongzi from a woman in Hangzhou who had been wrapping them for fifty-seven years. Her hands moved with the precision of a machine: two leaves, crossed and folded into a cone; a scoop of rice soaked in soy sauce; a chunk of pork belly, the fat glistening; a salted duck egg yolk, the color of a setting sun. Then the folding, the tying, the tug of cotton string. She never measured. She never hesitated. "You want a recipe?" she said, seeing me scribble notes. "There is no recipe. The rice tells you when it's right."
For the uninitiated, the most common filling in northern China is red bean paste (hongdou sha, 红豆沙), sweet and sandy, while southern versions favor savory pork belly with chestnuts and dried shrimp. The rice itself must be soaked for at least four hours, then drained, then tossed with a whisper of dark soy sauce and white pepper. The bamboo leaves—bought dried, then boiled until pliant—impart a green, almost grassy fragrance that cuts through the richness of the filling. When you unwrap a freshly steamed zongzi, the leaves pull away with a soft hiss, and the rice inside is tight-packed and glistening, every grain distinct yet clinging to its neighbor.
Eat one standing at a temple fair, the heat of the rice warming your palms, the bamboo leaf still damp in your other hand. The steam fogs your glasses. The pork fat melts on your tongue. This is the fourth month, condensed into a single mouthful.
A Folk Song for the Season: “The Fourth Month of the Farmer’s Calendar”
The fourth month has its own soundtrack. In the countryside of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, farmers still sing a traditional work song called Nongjia Si Yue (农家四月, The Farmer’s Fourth Month). The melody is simple—just five notes, repeated and varied—and the lyrics describe the landscape in plain, aching detail:
Si yue nongjia mang,
Cai sang you cha yang.
Yuan li hu die fei,
Tian li shui mang mang.
四月农家忙，
采桑又插秧。
园里蝴蝶飞，
田里水茫茫。
The fourth month, the farmer is busy—
Picking mulberry leaves, transplanting rice.
In the garden, butterflies drift;
In the fields, the water stretches vast and blind.
I first heard this song at a temple fair in Suzhou, sung by an old man who had been a rice farmer for forty years before his knees gave out. He sang it without accompaniment, his voice thin and reedy, while the crowd around him haggled over plastic toys and fried tofu. Nobody stopped to listen. Nobody needed to. The song was not for them—it was for the fields, for the water, for the season itself.
The lyric "the water stretches vast and blind" captures something essential about the fourth month. The rice paddies are flooded, reflecting the sky like a thousand broken mirrors. The air is heavy with moisture. Everything is waiting: the seedlings for sun, the temples for worshipers, the zongzi for their festival day. The fourth month is a month of preparation, of held breath.
Where to Catch the Most Intimate Fairs: Miaofengshan and Beyond
If you have only one temple fair to visit in the fourth lunar month, make it Miaofengshan (妙峰山) in Beijing’s Mentougou District. The fair runs for the entire month, but the 15th and 16th days—today—are its peak. Pilgrims climb the mountain on foot, a tradition called jinxiang (进香, offering incense). The path is steep, lined with stalls selling cool cucumber slices speared on bamboo sticks and bowls of tofu pudding drizzled with ginger syrup. By the time you reach the temple at the summit, your calves will burn and your shirt will be soaked through. But the view—the green sprawl of the North China Plain, the smoke rising from a hundred incense burners—makes the climb worth it.
For something quieter, head south to Fuzhou, Fujian province, where the temple fairs of the fourth month center on the worship of Mazu (妈祖), the sea goddess. Here, the atmosphere is saltier, the offerings include fresh fish and seaweed, and the stilt-walkers wear costumes painted with waves and dragons. The incense smoke mixes with ocean breeze, and the sound of wooden clappers echoes off temple walls painted in faded cobalt blue. If you check the Wealth God Direction for today—West—you will find local devotees facing precisely that way during their prayers, aligning their bodies with the cosmic currents.
In smaller villages across Shanxi, the temple fairs are barely documented. They appear overnight, a cluster of tarps and grills in a dirt lot next to a Tang-dynasty temple nobody has heard of. There are no tourists. The performances are amateur—stilt-walkers who wobble genuinely, drummers who miss a beat—but the sincerity is overwhelming. These are communities keeping a contract with their gods, a promise made centuries ago and renewed every fourth month.
To find out whether today's almanac suits your own plans—or just to marvel at how intricate the system really is—the Chinese Almanac Today offers a daily breakdown of fortunes, taboos, and cosmic alignments. But if you ask me, the temple fair doesn't care. It happens anyway.
Leaning Into the Unlucky Day
The almanac says this is a Black Road day, a day of Heavenly Punishment, a day when the stars conspire against beginnings. And yet here they are: thousands of people climbing a mountain to burn sticks of incense and watch a man on stilts pretend to fall. There is a lesson in that, if you want one.
Near the temple gate, I buy a taiping (太平, peace) charm from a woman who has been selling them since the 1980s. Her hands are knotted with arthritis, and she ties the red string around my wrist with surprising gentleness. "Lucky day, unlucky day," she says, as if reading my thoughts. "The gods don't check the calendar before they bless you." She turns to the next customer, and I am left standing in the smoke and noise and chaos, a red string around my wrist, a taste of rice and bamboo leaf on my tongue, and the strange, certain sense that I have just participated in something older than any almanac could contain.
This article is based on traditional Chinese calendrical systems and historical texts, provided for cultural learning and reference purposes only.