Traditional Tongshu vs a Modern Good Day Tool
A tongshu, the traditional Chinese almanac book, is a year you can hold. Each civil or lunar page carries the day pillar, the day officer, the path, suitable and unsuitable activities, clash, and a cluster of other cautions. Households and temples have used those pages for a long time, and different printers have never agreed on every line. Pick a Good Day is not a scan of one of those books and not a live feed from a vendor. It is a fixed method that ranks a window of civil dates and explains the line in English.
Key facts
- The library behind the page is lunar-javascript. The same window always yields the same order. A later visit does not quietly swap in another school’s table.
- You choose the occasion and the dates, up to one year. You do not buy a whole printed almanac.
- Scoring is public in its shape: activity matches for the occasion, yellow or black path, a few day officers, and optional clash penalties of six and four.
- The free screen shows one day, the top of that order. The rest is the subscription, not yet for sale.
- English is paired with the Chinese term. The rank itself still keys off the Chinese activity names.
- Medical entries are stripped from what you see and do not change the order. A paper tongshu may still print them. We do not rank from them.
What the paper page still does well
A printed year is stable in the hand. It can include seasonal essays, solar-term times, and local notes this website does not try to reproduce. A family copy may follow a school your grandparents trust. If that book and this tool disagree on a single day’s suitable list, the disagreement is real. Almanac traditions are not one spreadsheet. We do not pretend our line is the only line a serious reader will ever meet. We do say what our line is, and we lock it so the website itself does not drift between visits.
Paper also does not ask you to pick an “occasion” before you read. You see the whole list and decide. That is a strength when you want to browse. It is a slower way to answer “which of these seventeen days is the least awkward for a move.” The tool is built for the second question.
Schools, regions, and honest mismatch
Some tongshu emphasize particular spirits, directions, or taboos more heavily than our score does. Our score does not add points for the sha direction, and it does not add points for the Peng Zu line, even though both are printed so you can see them. A reader who treats Peng Zu as decisive will want to read that line and may set aside our number. That is a legitimate use of the card. The number is a consistent sort, not a claim that every traditional caution has been weighted.
What the ranked window adds
You set a start date and an end date. Travel, wedding, memorial, meeting, or opening applies a known activity list: 出行; 嫁娶; 安葬 and 祭祀; 会友 and 订盟; 开市, 移徙, and 入宅. Custom skips activities and sorts by path and officer alone. Suitable matches add four each. Unsuitable matches subtract five each. Yellow path adds two. Black path subtracts two. Success or Open adds two. Full adds one. Close or Destruction subtracts two. A birth date, optional, subtracts six if the day clashes your year branch and four if it clashes your day-pillar branch. No ten-god pass is made over the days. The worked travel sample locked in our checks, 1–21 October 2026 with no birth date, leads with 13 October, score 8, Geng Shen, Open, Golden Coffer, yellow path, travel suitable. Quote that as a method check, not as a universal lucky day.
English, scope, and what we refused to automate
Labels such as Open (开) or moving into a new home (入宅) are glosses for readers who do not work in Chinese. They are not a new system. The site does not cast Qi Men boards, Zi Wei star charts, or a feng shui survey of your flat. Those are other arts. A BaZi birth chart is available as its own professional reading, Light or Full, and it is not a substitute tongshu page.
Prices on the plans page are shelf prices: $12.99 a month, $29.99 a quarter, $89.99 a year. One day of any window can be read now. Nothing is mailed. A digital tongshu page and a printed heirloom can sit on the same desk. They will not always match, and you are allowed to prefer the heirloom for a rite your family already defined.
What this is not
This is not a claim that printers are obsolete, and not a claim that our score exhausts the tradition. It is not medical, legal, or financial advice. It is not entertainment. The tool is professional guidance for date selection. The fiction quiz on this domain is unrelated to how a tongshu line is chosen.