Topic: Equinoxes and Solstices
How does China mark Equinoxes and Solstices?
冬至
- Local date
- December 22, 2026
- When is it?
- The day on which the sun reaches 270 degrees of ecliptic longitude, timed in UTC+8.
The winter solstice is not a day off in China. The Measures on Holidays for National Annual Festivals and Memorial Days (State Council Order No. 795, fourth revision of 10 November 2024, in force 1 January 2025) list seven festivals with public holidays, and exactly one of them is dated by a solar term: Qingming, which the text describes as falling on the day of Qingming itself — a point on the sun's path at 15 degrees of ecliptic longitude, not a lunar date, despite the wording. Which days are actually off is set separately every year: State Council General Office circular No. 7 of 2025, issued 4 November 2025, gave Qingming 2026 three days, 4 to 6 April, with no make-up working day. The solar terms themselves were listed as national intangible cultural heritage in 2006 and inscribed by UNESCO on 30 November 2016 as knowledge of time developed through observation of the sun's annual motion; winter-solstice rituals such as the Sanmen jidong ceremony joined the extension list in 2014. What people eat splits along an old line: dumplings in the north, tangyuan in the south.
What is this topic?
These are the only holidays whose date nobody chose. The sun reaches a point on the ecliptic and that is the day. What differs is how each state writes that fact into law. Japan made the spring and autumn equinoxes statutory holidays without naming a date, leaves the calculation to its national observatory, and only fixes each year's dates in an official gazette the previous February. Taiwan's holiday act dates exactly two days by solar term and never mentions the winter solstice. In China only one statutory holiday, Qingming, is dated by the sun. India's Makar Sankranti has drifted three weeks away from the solstice it once marked. The United States skipped astronomy altogether and legislated "the second Sunday of March."
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.