Chinese New Year Snake. Many online Chinese Sign calculators do not account for the non-alignment of the two calendars, using Gregorian-calendar years rather than official Chinese New Year dates. One scheme of continuously numbered Chinese-calendar years assigns 4709 to the year beginning, 2011, but this is not universally accepted; the calendar is traditionally cyclical, not continuously numbered. Although the Chinese calendar traditionally does not use continuously numbered years, outside China its years are sometimes numbered from the purported reign of the mythical Yellow Emperor in the 3rd millennium BCE. But at least three different years numbered 1 are now used by various scholars,
Chinese New Year day or even one moon cycle due to using a meridian based on a different capital city in a different time zone or different placements of intercalary months. Chinese calendar defines the lunar month with winter solstice as the 11th month, which means that Chinese New Year usually falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice (rarely the third if an intercalary month intervenes). In more than 96% of the years, the Chinese New Year's Day is the closest new moon to lichun () on 4 or 5 February, and the first new moon after Dahan (). In