一元复始 (yī yuán fù shǐ) — The Count Comes Back to Its Head · The Year Begins Again

Five broken lines with a single unbroken one underneath them — that is 复, and in the system the Han calendarists used to lay twelve of the sixty-four figures of the 《周易》 over the twelve months, 复 is the eleventh, the month containing the shortest day of the year. The figure is read from the bottom, so the whole yang is the newest thing in it: one solid line come back at the base of a column of dark. What the assignment claims is not that the solstice is when conditions improve. It is that the solstice is when they stop deteriorating, and that this — not the thaw, not the first green — is the point a year should be counted from. The 象传 draws the practical conclusion and it is a startling one: 先王以至日闭关，商旅不行，后不省方. On the solstice the passes were shut, the merchants stayed off the roads, and the ruler did not go out to inspect his territories. The one return the calendar could identify was given silence rather than ceremony.

The other half of the phrase comes from a quarrel about a single word on the first line of a book. 《春秋》 opens by dating itself, and it writes 元年 where any ordinary count would write 一年. 《公羊传》 stops there — on the opening clause of the entire commentary — to ask why: 元年者何？君之始年也. 元 is not the ordinal. 《说文解字》 gives it as 始也, beginning, and the graph is a standing figure with the head marked out, which is why the character still means head everywhere else it appears: 元首 for a head of state, 状元 for the top of the examination list, 元凶 for the principal offender. 董仲舒, arguing before Emperor Wu for why the annals chose it, took the two characters apart and then put them back: 一者万物之所从始也，元者辞之所谓大也 — one is what all things begin from, and 元 is the word's way of saying great — 谓一为元者，视大始而欲正本也, and to call the one an 元 is to look to the 大始, the great beginning, and mean to set the root straight. That last clause is what carries 元 back to 始, and it is why 一元 is not "one unit" of anything. It is the head of a count, named as such.

The four characters together are not a quotation, and no classical text contains them in this order. They are a later assembly, made for the doorway, that puts the two claims side by side: the head of the count, and the return. The structure is subject and predicate rather than two matched pairs — 一元 is what is being spoken about and 复始 is what it does — and a reader who does not see that grammar will take 一元 for a quantity, which in a modern shop is one yuan. It also repays reading the second half narrowly. 复 is the 复 of 反复 — coming round again — and not the 复 of 恢复, repairing something that had broken. Nothing in the phrase has been mended and nothing has been wiped. The count has arrived back at the position counts are started from, which is a fact about where you are in a cycle rather than a claim about the condition of anything inside it.

• 元年者何？君之始年也。

  《公羊传·隐公元年》(Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, c. 200 BCE)
  What is meant by 元年? It is the ruler's first year. — The question is asked about the second and third characters of the 《春秋》, before the commentary has done anything else at all. It is worth asking because the annals could have written 一年 and did not: 元 marks the head of a count rather than its first item, and Chinese has kept the distinction ever since — a reign has an 元年, never a 一年.

• 雷在地中，复。先王以至日闭关，商旅不行，后不省方。

  《周易·复卦·象传》(Book of Changes, Image Commentary on the Fu hexagram, c. 300 BCE)
  Thunder within the earth: return. On the solstice the former kings closed the passes; merchants and travellers did not move, and the ruler did not tour the regions. — The thunder is underground and inaudible, which is the point. The one moment in the year the calendar could name as a turn was met by shutting the country down for a day rather than by marking it, on the reasoning that something just beginning is best left alone.

• 天时人事日相催，冬至阳生春又来。

  杜甫《小至》(Du Fu, "The Lesser Solstice," c. 766 CE)
  Season and human business drive each other on, day after day; at the winter solstice the yang is born and spring is on its way again. — Du Fu wrote this in his wandering years at Kuizhou, on or about the eve of the solstice — the commentators do not agree on which day 小至 names — and the second line is the whole calendar in seven characters. Note the order he puts them in: the yang appears first and the spring follows, six weeks behind it. The turn is dated to the dark part.

For most of Chinese history nobody's age was counted from their own birthday. Under 虚岁 a baby was one year old at birth and gained a year at the New Year, so a child born in the last week of the twelfth month was two years old inside a fortnight, and the entire country grew older on the same morning. Age was a position in the public calendar rather than a private anniversary, which is why the New Year greetings for an elder and the birthday greetings for one are largely the same stock of phrases, and why this one carries between the two occasions without adjustment. The reckoning is now mostly retired — 周岁, the counted-from-birth age, is what appears on documents — but it survives in speech among older speakers, and it is the reason a grandmother may give two different numbers for her age without either being wrong.

杜甫's line about the solstice mentions a second thing going on that day: 吹葭六琯动飞灰, ash blown from the six pipes. The reference is to 候气, an apparatus described in the 《后汉书·律历志》 in which the twelve pitch-pipes of the musical system were packed with the ash of reed membrane at the inner end and stood upright in a sealed triple-walled chamber, one pipe for each month. The claim was that at the exact moment a solar term arrived the ash would puff out of the corresponding pipe. It did not work, and it took a very long time to say so: 沈括 raised the obvious objection in the 《梦溪笔谈》 — twelve pipes a few feet apart, and only one of them responds — and then talked himself back out of it, and the procedure survived another five centuries. 朱载堉 built pipes by the hundred in the Ming and concluded that everyone who had believed in it was either a fool or a fraud. The Kangxi emperor had the Bureau of Astronomy demonstrate the method in front of the Jesuits at court, watched nothing happen, and ruled it a fabrication. But it is worth knowing what was being attempted, because it says what kind of phrase this is. Somebody buried instruments in the ground to catch the year turning over. The turn was treated as a measurable event with a date on it, and 一元复始 reports the measurement rather than a mood.