section_path: Etymology
section_name: Etymology
paragraph_text: Etymology
  
  The name of calendar is in Chinese: 曆; pinyin: lì, and was represented in earlier character forms variants (歷, 厤), and ultimately derived from an ancient form (秝). The ancient form of the character consists of two stalks of rice plant (禾), arranged in parallel. This character represents the order in space and also the order in time. As its meaning became complex, the modern dedicated character (曆) was created to represent the meaning of calendar.
  
  Maintaining the correctness of calendars was an important task to maintain the authority of rulers, being perceived as a way to measure the ability of a ruler. For example, someone seen as a competent ruler would foresee the coming of seasons and prepare accordingly. This understanding was also relevant in predicting abnormalities of the Earth and celestial bodies, such as lunar and solar eclipses. The significant relationship between authority and timekeeping helps to explain why there are 102 calendars in Chinese history, trying to predict the correct courses of sun, moon and stars, and marking good time and bad time. Each calendar is named as ＿＿曆 and recorded in a dedicated calendar section in history books of different eras. The last one in imperial era was 時憲曆. A ruler would issue an almanac before the commencement of each year. There were private almanac issuers, usually illegal, when a ruler lost his control of some territories.
  
  There are various Chinese terms for the calendar including:
  
  Various modern Chinese calendar names resulted from the struggle between the introduction of Gregorian calendar by government and the preservation of customs by the public in the era of Republic of China. The government wanted to abolish the Chinese calendar to force everyone to use the Gregorian calendar, and even abolished the Chinese New Year, but faced great opposition. The public needed the astronomical Chinese calendar to do things at a proper time, for example farming and fishing; also, a wide spectrum of festivals and customs observations have been based on the calendar. The government finally compromised and rebranded it as the agricultural calendar in 1947, depreciating the calendar to merely agricultural use.
  
  After the end of the imperial era, there are some almanacs based upon the algorithm of the last Imperial calendar with longitude of Peking. Such almanacs were under the name of "universal book" 通書, or under Cantonese name 通勝, transcribed as Tung Shing. Later these almanacs moved to new calculation based on the location of Purple Mountain Observatory, with longitude of 120°E.