Eva Chin writes for RECATOOLS on business and commerce in Southeast Asia: the commercial decisions small businesses actually face, and the markets and regulation around them. She also covers Chinese naming and cultural practice, education and qualifications across the region, and the arithmetic of a tropical home. Coverage of cultural practice is educational — it explains what a tradition holds and where it came from, and does not make predictive claims.

128
Articles
Business
Primary beat
Jul 2026
Writing since
~862 min
Total reading
All 128 Business 101 Chinese Culture 25 Home & Living 2

Articles · Chinese Culture Showing 11–20 of 25

A dense field of stars against a dark night sky
Chinese Culture

Why two calculators give you different birth charts

The same birth details can produce different charts because the tradition has argued for centuries about when a day begins and what to do with a leap month. Almost nothing tells you which answer your tool picked.

31 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
A gilded Chinese signboard mounted beneath a temple eave
Chinese Culture

What happens to Chinese punctuation when text runs vertically

Turning Chinese sideways does not turn its punctuation sideways. Quotation marks become different characters entirely, the smaller marks move to two different positions, and CSS does none of it.

31 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
A calligraphy brush drawing a broad black stroke on white paper
Chinese Culture

There is no single order to learn Chinese characters

There are at least four orderings, built for different jobs, and they disagree about the first hundred characters more than any single list admits. Two things widely said about the current syllabus are also not true.

31 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
Lit paper lanterns with Chinese characters hanging in a row
Chinese Culture

Why Tet and Chinese New Year sometimes fall a month apart

In 1985 Vietnam celebrated on 21 January and China on 20 February. The explanation everyone gives for the usual one-day gaps is the wrong explanation for that one, and checking the new moons shows why.

31 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
Illuminated Chinese neon shop signs above a Hong Kong street at night
Chinese Culture

The h in Cantonese Yale is not a sound

At the start of a syllable the h is the consonant you expect. At the end it is silent — it marks the tone. Beginners pronounce it, and it is one of the fastest ways to sound wrong to a native speaker.

31 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
Two framed panels of classical Chinese text set in vertical columns
Chinese Culture

The pattern behind the order of the 64 hexagrams

The I Ching's numbered sequence has a strict rule running through it that almost no introduction mentions — and you can check it by hand across all 64 in about ten minutes. What the rule does not explain is why the pairs come in the order they do.

31 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
A brass sundial on a white plinth, its gnomon casting a shadow across the dial
Chinese Culture

Why your Singapore birth certificate time is an hour off the sun

The clock here runs about 65 minutes ahead of the sun, and it ran half an hour closer before 1982. If you are entering a birth time into a Chinese astrology chart, that gap can move you into a different two-hour block — and there is a second correction most explanations leave out.

31 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
Pink cherry blossom in full flower against a pale blue sky
Chinese Culture

Is 2027 a year without spring?

It is — the lunar year from 6 February 2027 contains no 立春, and you can check it against a government table in ninety seconds. But sorting 199 years of those tables shows the label is a restatement of something far more ordinary.

31 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
A tear-off wall calendar with one date circled in red
Chinese Culture

Why most lunar calendar apps get 2033 wrong

There is one year in the next century where lunar calendar apps disagree with each other. Ask yours where the leap month falls in 2033 and you get either the seventh month or the eleventh, depending on which rule the developer implemented.

31 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
A full moon in a dark blue night sky, partly veiled by thin cloud
Chinese Culture

Mid-Autumn is two days before the full moon this year

The festival lands on 25 September and the moon reaches full on the 27th. The gap is larger than usual, it is one day rather than two if you are in Bangkok, and standing outside on the fifteenth you will not be able to see it — the moon that night is 98% lit.

31 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
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