Chinese date format converter. Any Gregorian date → standard / written-out / lunar / 干支 formats. For invitations, formal documents, traditional records.
Chinese Date Format Converter (中文日期格式)
How to use
Pick a Gregorian date
Any date between 1900-2100.
View 4 Chinese formats
Standard (2026年5月22日), Written-out (二〇二六年五月二十二日), Lunar, GanZhi.
Copy your preferred format
Each row has a Copy button — paste into Word, invitation cards, contracts.
Format selection guide
Wedding invitations: Written-out. Business contracts: Standard. Traditional documents: Lunar or GanZhi.
Chinese Date Formats: From Invitations to Contracts
Chinese dates have multiple formal formats, each with specific use cases. From the everyday Standard form (2026年5月22日), to the formal Written-out form (二〇二六年五月二十二日), to traditional Lunar (丙午年四月十六), to classical 干支 (丙午年癸巳月丁酉日) — different occasions call for different formats.
The 4 formats and their uses
(1) Standard: daily correspondence, email, web. (2) Written-out: wedding invitations, milestone-birthday cards, graduation certificates. (3) Lunar: traditional festival invitations, ancestor rites, elder birthdays. (4) GanZhi: classical calligraphy, couplets, temple records, fortune-reading certificates.
ASEAN Chinese tradition
Large Chinese events (weddings, milestone birthdays, graduations, shop openings) commonly use both Standard + Written-out. This tool shows all 4 at once for convenient selection.
10 Facts about Chinese Date Formats
Wedding invitations traditionally use Written-out — 二〇二六年五月二十二日 reads more formal than 2026年5月22日.
HK legal letters still prefer Written-out — to avoid number-tampering disputes. The practical reason capital formats survive from Qing times to today.
HK/Taiwan/Macau/SG/MY/ID Chinese invitations are often dual-dated: Gregorian (legal) + Lunar (traditional). Tool provides both for cross-reference.
2026 = 丙午 year. Classical invitations may use "丙午年仲夏" (more elegant) instead of "5月".
Temples, Taoist halls, and 命理 certificates use GanZhi format almost exclusively — the "era identifier" of religious + traditional culture.
HK hand-written cheques still require capital-format dates per HKMA Banking (Cheque) Rules.
Mainland China marriage certs + household books use Standard (2026年5月22日) — the unified official format set by national rules.
Traditional Lunar may include day-ganzhi detail (丙午年四月十六 丁酉日). Tool's Lunar format omits day-ganzhi for brevity; use GanZhi format if you need it.
In Chinese calligraphy, dates are conventionally written in GanZhi format — classical aesthetic tradition.
Pairs with RT-CHN-010 (Lunar-Solar Converter) + RT-CHN-013 (GanZhi). Use together for complete Chinese-date information.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Written-out is most formal (二〇二六年五月二十二日). Adding Lunar date as traditional cross-reference (dual-dated) is common.
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Standard (2026年5月22日). Clear, readable, unambiguous. All modern business documents use it.
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No. Browser-local, no server calls.
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All three use the same 4 formats. Lunar style differs: HK favours 「丙午年初五」, Taiwan favours 「丙午年五月十六」 (complete), Macau uses both.
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Yes — Copy buttons put plain text on the clipboard; paste into any document editor.
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Tool is Chinese-date-format specific. For English dates use your browser's date tool or RT-CNV-085 (Date Difference Calculator).
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Tool supports 1900-2100. Pre-1949 ROC era format ("中華民國 X 年") is not supported — manually convert (Gregorian year − 1911 = ROC year).
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Yes. These are linguistically correct standard Chinese date formats — suitable for all formal contexts: invitations, contracts, certificates, literary writing.
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Lunar/Solar (RT-CHN-010) shows complete lunar info (ganzhi, zodiac, 纳音, solar terms). This tool focuses on "format output" — 4 formal Chinese date strings. Complementary.
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Written-out is more formal. But many modern invitations use Standard for brevity. Both are valid; up to the couple's preference.
Method & sources
How it computes
A Gregorian date is converted to the Chinese lunisolar calendar and then written out in the conventional forms — the lunar month and day in Chinese numerals, the 干支 year, the zodiac animal, and the solar term where the date falls on one. The conversion is a table lookup, not a formula.
What this tool implements
- The Chinese calendar is lunisolar, not lunar: months follow the moon and are kept in step with the solar year by leap months, so a lunar date maps to a different Gregorian date each year and a leap month repeats a month number. Conversion is table-driven rather than formulaic, which is why a library rather than a calculation sits behind it.
- Month and day are written in the traditional Chinese forms — 正月, 冬月, 臘月 for the first, eleventh and twelfth months, and 初一 through 三十 for days — rather than as Arabic numerals, because those are the forms an almanac or an invitation actually uses.
- The 干支 year is shown alongside the zodiac animal. They are not the same thing: the animal repeats every twelve years, the 干支 pair every sixty.
Sources
- lunar-javascript v1.7.7 by 6tail, MIT licence: https://github.com/6tail/lunar-javascript — the conversion tables and the 干支 arithmetic behind every date on this page. Vendored locally; nothing is fetched at request time. API reference: https://6tail.cn/calendar/api.html
What can make this go out of date
- lunar-javascript is vendored at v1.7.7 and nothing refetches it. Its conversion tables are the dependency: a correction upstream — most likely at a leap-month or solar-term boundary — reaches this page only on a manual update.
- Solar terms are astronomical events with times, not dates, so a term falling near midnight can land on either side depending on the timezone the table was computed for. Dates near a term boundary are the ones worth double-checking against an official almanac.
Pick up where you left off
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