Spring

In the five phase system that organizes classical Chinese cosmology, medicine and calendar keeping, spring is the season paired with the phase Wood, the phase whose defining behaviors, in the oldest surviving definition from the Hongfan chapter of the Book of Documents, are simply that it bends and it straightens, an image of directed, upward growth rather than a fixed substance. Spring's yang energy is described as rising rather than dominant, still building toward the fullness it will reach at summer, and the season is read as the year's point of germination, when dormant potential from the preceding winter first pushes upward and outward into visible growth.

Chinese medicine extends the correspondence into the body, pairing Wood and spring with the liver and its paired organ the gall bladder, and with the emotion anger, understood in that framework not as a symptom to suppress but as the season's characteristic energy expressed, for better or worse, through this particular organ system; classical medical texts describe spring as a season for supporting the liver's smooth, unobstructed flow, an idea expressed in dietary and lifestyle guidance across the tradition rather than in any single fixed rule. The generating cycle of the five phases holds that Wood feeds Fire, so spring is read as the season that builds toward summer's fuller flowering, while the controlling cycle holds that Wood restrains Earth, giving spring's rising energy a checking role over the pivot phase associated with the turn of each season.

Sources Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to HeavenDavid W. Pankenier with The Foundations of Chinese Medicine: A Comprehensive TextGiovanni Maciocia

Spring in the Chinese lunisolar calendar opens with its most significant date, Chinese New Year, also called the Spring Festival, which falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice and remains the most widely observed holiday across Chinese communities worldwide, marked by family reunion meals, ancestral offerings, and a fifteen day observance closing with the Lantern Festival. Because the Chinese calendar tracks the moon while also correcting periodically to stay aligned with the solar year and its twenty four solar terms, Chinese New Year's date shifts within a roughly one month window on the Gregorian calendar from year to year rather than falling on a fixed day.

Later in spring, Qingming, the Tomb Sweeping Festival, falls at a fixed solar term roughly in early April, when families visit and tend ancestral graves, make offerings, and, in some regions, observe related customs tied to the same seasonal turn toward renewed outdoor activity after winter. The solar terms themselves, a set of twenty four points spaced through the solar year and used to time agricultural work, place several of their earliest markers, including the Beginning of Spring and Rain Water, within this season, reflecting the calendar's origins as a practical tool for a largely agrarian society tracking exactly when to prepare fields and begin planting.