Xiaoman, Grain Buds, literally Lesser Fullness, is the eighth solar term, at the sun's longitude of 60 degrees, around the twenty-first of May. It is a principal (zhongqi) term. Its name describes the grain in the northern fields growing plump but not yet ripe, filling toward but short of fullness. In the farming almanac it is a time of watchful tending as the crops mature and the summer rains begin, and in the silk regions it is associated with the care of silkworms. 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 twenty-four-fold division of the tropical year, in which each term names a precise fifteen-degree step of the sun along the ecliptic.
Xiaoman, Grain Buds or Minor Fullness, falls at 60 degrees, around 21 May, and is a qi, or major, term. Its name, literally small fullness, refers to the traditional observation that summer grain crops are filling out but not yet fully ripe at this point in the year, distinguishing it from the fuller, more definite ripeness implied by later terms in the harvest sequence. Xiaoman has no exact counterpart among the twenty-four terms describing an equivalent "minor" stage for the autumn harvest, an asymmetry some scholars attribute to the system's origin as a practical farming calendar focused on the specific rhythms of wheat and early rice cultivation in the North China Plain rather than on a fully symmetrical seasonal design.