Topic: Equinoxes and Solstices
How does Taiwan mark Equinoxes and Solstices?
冬至
- Local date
- December 22, 2026
- When is it?
- The day the sun reaches an apparent ecliptic longitude of 270 degrees, timed in Taiwan time (UTC+8) by the Central Weather Administration's calendar data tables.
Taiwan also gives no day off for the winter solstice, and its Act on Commemorative Days and Holidays never mentions it at all. Two days in the whole Act are dated by solar term: Tomb-Sweeping Day, "set on the day of Qingming" (Article 5(1)(3)), which is a day off, and Farmers' Day, "set on the day of Lichun" (Article 5(4)), which is not. Because the Qingming date moves, Article 6(2) had to add a collision rule: when Children's Day and Tomb-Sweeping Day land on the same date, the day off is taken the day before — unless that falls on a Thursday, in which case it is taken the day after. That is not hypothetical. By the Central Weather Administration's calendar tables, Qingming 2028 falls on 4 April, which is Children's Day, and 4 April 2028 is a Tuesday, so the holiday moves back to 3 April. The administration publishes solar-term times in Taiwan time; the 2026 solstice is 22 December at 04:50. At home people eat tangyuan and take winter tonics, and the saying that a bowl of tangyuan makes you a year older has outlived every statute.
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.