Sources
Where these pages get their facts
Every factual claim on this site carries a source you can open yourself. This page names the ones we use, the ones we refuse, and how to cite us back.
What counts as a source here
- A document we opened and read — not a search result, not another site's summary of it.
- For a classical text: the work and the chapter, named, and the original wording quoted where the wording is the point.
- For a computed value — a calendar boundary, a hidden-stem table, a solar term — the rule behind it and, where one exists, the standard that fixes it.
- For a birth date or an event: the record that states it, with the grade of that record made explicit — a register, a press report, a fan wiki.
Where the material comes from
Four kinds of source carry most of the weight:
Standards and observatories
Calendar arithmetic, solar terms, and the boundary rules.
Classical texts
Quoted by work and chapter — the Sanming Tonghui, the Shuowen Jiezi, the Shiji, the Book of Songs.
Scholarship and reference
Research on the branch system and Chinese calendrics, plus an occupational database.
News archives
Used for how a tradition is reported in China today — a record of the reporting, not authority on the tradition.
What we will not cite
- A link we have not opened ourselves — however authoritative the domain looks.
- An aggregator page as the origin of a statistic, when the body that published it is reachable.
- A page we cannot load. A source whose TLS certificate is expired or matched to another host counts as unreachable, whatever the domain's reputation.
- A model's summary — including our own — as the source for a claim.
Conventions we state instead of choosing silently
Where sources disagree, this site shows both readings and labels them rather than picking one. Two that come up constantly:
- The zodiac year boundary. China's national standard for the Chinese calendar (GB/T 33661-2017, drafted by the Purple Mountain Observatory) puts the animal-sign boundary at the first day of the first lunar month. The stem-and-branch reckoning used by Four Pillars charting begins the year at Lichun, 3–5 February. Pages label which convention is in use; neither is presented as the popular or the correct one.
- Hidden stems. A branch's hidden stems can mean which stems the branch contains as a whole, or which stem governs inside a given month and for how many days (Sanming Tonghui, vol. 2). Those are different questions, and each page says which one it is answering.
Citing GPTbazi
If you are writing, teaching, or answering questions with these pages, this is what lets a reader check you:
GPTbazi, "<page title>" — https://gptbazi.com/<path> (accessed <date>)
Every article also ships a plain-text twin at <path>.md, and /llms.txt lists the site's pages and the conventions above.