Chinese festivals: every date this year and next, and what each one is

The big one, and the only festival that the whole country physically moves for. The lunar year turns on the new moon, the animal changes with it, and the fortnight before is spent cleaning the house, settling debts and getting home. New Year's Eve is the reunion dinner; the first day is for visiting; the celebrations run, in theory, until the Lantern Festival two weeks later. Mainland China gives four statutory days, from the eve through the third of the month, and stretches them to a week with borrowed weekends.

The first full moon of the year, and the official end of New Year. People go out after dark to look at lanterns, solve the riddles hung from them, and eat sweet glutinous rice balls, which are round for the same reason the mooncake is. In the old cities it was the one night of the year the curfew lifted and unmarried women were out in the streets, which is why some scholars call it, rather than Qixi, the real lovers' night of the Chinese calendar. Not a day off anywhere on the mainland.

Tomb-sweeping day. Families go to the family graves, clear the weeds, repaint the inscriptions, lay out food and burn paper offerings, and then, because it is also the first properly warm weekend of spring, have a picnic. It is the only festival on this page that is a solar term first and a festival second, which is why it barely moves. One statutory day on the mainland.

Long narrow boats with a dragon's head, paddled to a drum, and pyramids of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaf. The story everyone tells is that both commemorate the poet Qu Yuan, who drowned himself in 278 BC; the racing and the rice are very likely older than the story, and the fifth month was feared as a poisonous one long before anyone attached a poet to it. One statutory day on the mainland.

The seventh night, when the Weaver Girl and the Oxherd, two stars on opposite banks of the Milky Way, are allowed to meet across a bridge of magpies. It is sold now as Chinese Valentine's Day, a label only a few decades old. For most of its history it was a festival of skill, on which girls threaded needles by moonlight and floated them on water to see whether they had the knack. The page tells both halves.

The seventh lunar month is the month the gates of the underworld stand open, and its fifteenth is the night the dead are fed. Families set out food and burn paper money and paper goods on the pavement, and the sensible avoid swimming, moving house, or whistling after dark. In Singapore and Malaysia it is one of the biggest events of the year, with open-air opera stages put up for an audience whose front row is left empty on purpose. Not a day off.

The eighth month's full moon, and the second-largest reunion of the year. Families eat together, go outside to look at the moon, and cut a mooncake into wedges. The organizing idea is roundness, and the page explains the salted egg yolk, the woman and the rabbit who live on the moon, and why the festival is not a solar term. One statutory day on the mainland.

Nine is the number of yang in the Book of Changes, and a day with two of them was thought too much of a good thing. The prescription, written down in the sixth century, was to climb somewhere high, carry a sprig of dogwood and drink chrysanthemum wine, and people still do all three. Since 1989 it has also been Seniors' Day in China. A public holiday in Hong Kong and Macau, not on the mainland.

The longest night, and the day the sun turns back, which the calendar treats as a small New Year: the northern half of the country eats dumplings, the southern half eats rice balls, and Cantonese families hold a dinner that many rate above the real New Year's Eve. A solar term, so it holds still. Not a day off.

The one most people only eat. Laba is a porridge of eight or more grains, beans and dried fruit, cooked on the eighth day of the last month, and it marks the point at which the New Year preparations begin in earnest. Temples give it away by the vat. Not a day off.