Chushu, the End of Heat, literally the Stopping of Heat, is the fourteenth solar term, at the sun's longitude of 150 degrees, around the twenty-third of August. It is a principal (zhongqi) term. Its name announces that the oppressive summer heat is finally breaking and the cooler air of autumn is settling in. In the farming almanac it is a time of harvest and of preparing the autumn crops, as the fields ripen and the days shorten. In some traditions it coincides with observances honouring the dead late in the seventh lunar month. Being a solar marker, it falls near the same Gregorian date each year. These are the observances of the East Asian agricultural tradition, resting on the division of the tropical year into twenty-four solar terms of fifteen degrees each.
Chushu, the End of Heat, falls at 150 degrees, around 23 August, and is a qi, or major, term, whose name signals the retreat of the summer heat that peaked at Dashu roughly a month earlier, even though the term still falls within the traditional sanfu period's tail end in some years. In parts of coastal and southern China, Chushu traditionally marks the point in the fishing calendar when a summer fishing moratorium, intended to allow fish stocks to recover during the breeding season, is lifted, and the term is associated in some regions with seafood-eating customs marking the season's fresh catch, a modern continuation of the term's older role as a marker for the agricultural and fishing year rather than a strictly meteorological one.