As we enter layue (蠟月), or the last month of the lunar year, a profound, clarifying chill is setting in. It is dahan (大寒), the 24th and final act in the ancient, elegant drama of the traditional East Asian lunisolar calendar. It typically arrives around Jan. 20, a punctuation mark of deep cold before the turn, signaling that the Spring Festival is just around the corner.
AGRARIAN GUIDE
This calendar, a system of 24 solar terms (half-month periods), is one of humanity’s most poetic exercises in timekeeping. Forged by agrarian astronomers millennia ago, it slices the sun’s journey into equal segments, naming not just seasons, but the subtle, specific moods of the natural world, such as jingzhe (驚蟄, emergence from hibernation), guyu (穀雨, grain rain) and chushu (處暑, limit of heat).
It guided ancient farmers with astonishing precision and shaped a culture’s eating, healing and philosophizing, all under the principle of living in sync with Heaven and Earth. In 2016, UNESCO rightly inscribed it as an intangible cultural heritage.
Dahan translates simply, yet problematically, as “great cold.” Or is it “greater cold”? “Major cold”? “Severe cold”? Consult different authorities — dictionaries, encyclopedias, meteorologists — and you will get varying answers. This linguistic scramble over a single word reveals the delightful difficulty of packaging a dense cultural concept for foreign tongues.
A Tang Dynasty poet captured its essence better than any dictionary: “In dahan, stay close to the fire. Don’t open the door without cause.”
DEEP COLD
The name itself feels like an incantation that conjures the very chill it describes — a dry, still, penetrating cold that seems to leech warmth from memory itself. It is the cold of a bare branch against a slate sky, of breath hanging crystalline in the air.
However, its true meaning is not found on a thermometer. Dahan is a turning point. It is the final note of winter’s movement, the moment when the silence is fullest, right before the first, faint callback of life. It is the ultimate yin — the dark, cold, latent feminine principle in Chinese cosmology — pregnant with its imminent opposite, yang.
As folk wisdom goes: Dahan to the extreme brings the turn to warmth. After hardship, fortune arrives.
This idea — that the seed of spring is hidden in the heart of deep winter — is what makes the term so resonant and so untidy to translate. “Great cold” feels merely descriptive. “Severe cold” is purely meteorological. They miss the philosophical heft, the sense of a destined, cyclical climax.
Perhaps the best approach is the one this system itself teaches: Embrace duality. Present the term as dahan (major cold), allowing the evocative sound of the original to lead, followed by a functional translation. It acknowledges that some concepts must travel with a bit of their native soil still clinging to the roots.
PROMISE
For now, as the dahan chill holds the land, the promise is absolute. The next solar term, only two weeks away, is lichun (立春, beginning of spring). The cycle, as it always has, would begin anew.
So let us appreciate this great, this greater, this major, this severe cold. It is not an end, but a gathering. A deep breath held before the exhalation of green and growth. The stillness, after all, is where the waiting seeds dream.
Hugo Tseng has a doctorate in linguistics, and is a lexicographer and former chair of Soochow University’s English Department.
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