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 calendar kingdom near Samarkand), and is the most-used system in modern China. Months are defined by the time between new moons, which averages days. Instead of using half-days to balance months with the lunar cycle, every other month of the year has 29 days (short month, ) and the rest have 30 (long month, ). Years start on a long month and alternate. A 12-month-year using this system has 354 days, which would drift significantly from the tropical year. To fix this, traditional Chinese years have a 13-month year every other year. The 13-month version has the same alternation of long