HUANG Shu-min
An ancient system for dating events, tiangan dizhi was replaced after the end of the Chinese imperial system by the Gregorian calendar. But some Chinese people still rely on the sixty-year cycle of tiangan dizhi to determine where and when to plan events both momentous and mundane in the course of their lives.
Tiangan dizhi is a cyclical time-measuring system used in China since antiquity. The system juxtaposes two parallel sequences: the