Evolution of the Calendar of the Hani Nationality

The original calendar of the Hani nationality, in which a year was divided into 10 months, a month had definitely 36 days and the additional 5 or 6 days were used to celebrate the New Year, is called "Ten-Month" Calendar for short.The "Kuzaza Festival" near the Summer Solstice and the "Ten-Month New Year" near the Winter Solstice are respectively the summer new year and winter new year in the ten-month calendar.Owing to the effect of the lunar calendar of the Han nationality and the adoption of twelve-month calendar, the 10-month calendar and 12-month calendar were mixed up and the phenomenon of month overlapping appeared.That is, the Hani people in their living paid attention to the use of numbering days by means of the twelve animals representing the twelve Earthly Branches, and their activities of agricultural production were arranged according to phenology, while there was not a strict way of numbering the months in their daily life.Two new years were introduced into the lunar calendar, the Ten-Month New Year was fixed in the 10th month(October), while the Kuzaza Festival in the 5th month(May) or 6th month(June) is generally called the June Festival.The dates of these two new years are determined according to any of the twelve animals.In this paper a discussion is presented on the general picture of the 10-month calendar.From the legend of the Hani fair tale and the analysis on the Bai's family tree in Luchun County, the Hani people began to accept the concept of the twelve-month ca lendar from the 14th century and before that time they used the 10-month calendar, and then the twelve-month calendar got widely accepted.Meanwhile, the contents of the 10-month calendar also gradually faded from people's memory.However, the evolution from the 10-month calendar to the general use of the lunar calendar was a long historical process which not been completed yet up to 1950.The main reasons were extremely slow economic development, difficulties in communications and very few exchanges with the outside world.