A Chinese Almanac Sheds Light on the Year Ahead
According to the Pocket Chinese Almanac, 2016 will experience "bad atmospheric conditions." (Régions Démocrates 2010/Flickr)
After a year marked with several international tragedies, much of the world began January hoping that 2016 will turn out better than 2015. Believers of the traditional Chinese almanac, however, may be disappointed.
“You can tell what kind of a year it’s going to be from the cow,” Ken Smith, half of the husband-and-wife team that publishes a condensed translation of the annual almanac, said in the New York Times. The almanac, which has been used as cultural guide for centuries, offers advice and tips on everything from medicinal remedy reccomendations to a list of auspicious days and events.
“It might be that the man behind the cow is not wearing shoes,” he explained, referring to an illustration featured in the new 2016 Pocket Chinese Almanac. “If the man isn’t wearing sandals, it’s going to be a very wet year. Bad flooding. And if it’s a bad year in terms of atmospheric conditions, it’s a bad year in human relations.”
Smith, along with his wife Joanna C. Lee, first introduced the English-speaking world to the auspicious soothsaying tips back in 2010. In 2014, Asia Society Hong Kong inivited the couple, along with Warwick Wong, a geomancer and almanac consultant who learned how to decode weather and agrarian trends from his ancestors, for a discussion on the roots of the almanac and its uses today.
Copies of the 2016 Pocket Chinese Almanac are available for purchase at the AsiaStore.
Watch the video below to see the full discussion from the event Decoding the Chinese Almanac (49 min., 49 sec.)