Han Lu 2026: Cold Dew Opens the Earth Dog Month on October 8

What "Cold Dew" marks

Han Lu is exact at 06:29 UTC on October 8: the moment the Sun has travelled 15° past the equinox point. The name pairs with the term a month earlier. On September 7 came Bai Lu (白露), White Dew — the first mornings when dew lay white on the grass. By Han Lu the same dew is cold. The classical gloss says the air has turned sharp enough that the dew is close to congealing, and the term after this one, Shuang Jiang (霜降) on October 23, is named for exactly that: Frost's Descent.

The astronomy behind the poetry is simple, and in London it is measurable. The equinox is not quite the day of equal light: refraction lifts the Sun above the horizon a little early and holds it a little late, so London's day was still longer than its night on September 25, and the night only overtook it on the 26th. By Han Lu the day is 11 hours 10 minutes and shrinking by almost four minutes a day; by the term's end on October 23 it is 10 hours 13 minutes. Cold Dew is the first term of the year in which, at London's latitude, every single night is longer than its day.

A note on precision, because we computed this rather than copying an almanac: our two independent implementations put the 2026 crossing at 06:29:17 and 06:29:58 UTC, a 41-second spread inside one minute. That is why this page states the minute — 06:29 UTC, 14:29 Beijing — and nothing finer.

The month pillar turns: Ding You to Wu Xu

The twenty-four terms alternate between section terms (节, jié), which open a Ba Zi month, and mid-month terms (中气, zhōngqì), which mark its centre. The equinox on September 23 was a mid-month term, so nothing turned then. Han Lu is a section term, so something does.

At 14:29 Beijing time on October 8, 2026 the month pillar changes from 丁酉 Ding You to 戊戌 Wu Xu. The change happens at the instant, not at midnight. A child born in Beijing at 14:00 that afternoon has a Rooster month in their chart; a child born at 15:00 has a Dog month. That is why a Ba Zi pillars calculation needs the birth time on a day like this, and why a calendar that switches months at midnight gets these births wrong.

All three instants are computed, and all three sit inside the year pillar 丙午 Bing Wu, the Fire Horse, which runs until Li Chun in February 2027.

What the Earth Dog month is made of

Wu Xu is Yang Earth (戊) sitting on the Dog branch (戌), and the Dog is itself an Earth branch. The month pillar is therefore Earth on Earth — the only month of this Ba Zi year with Earth on both the stem and the branch.

It is also more than Earth. The Dog is one of the four storage branches (辰戌丑未), the branches that hold another element in reserve at the close of a season, and the Dog stores Fire. We explain the mechanism in The Four Vaults of Ba Zi: at the end of autumn, the year's Fire goes underground into the Dog and waits.

In 2026 that detail matters, because the year is a Fire Horse. The Horse (午) and the Dog (戌) are two of the three branches of the Fire frame (寅午戌, Tiger–Horse–Dog). With the year branch and the month branch both present, the year and month pillars form a half Fire combination that stands for the whole Dog month. So the collective month is Earth on the surface with Fire gathered underneath it — which is how the classical texts would describe a late-autumn month in a Fire year.

How that reads for a particular person depends on the Day Master, the element of the person's own day stem. In Ten Gods terms, an Earth month relates to each Day Master element in a fixed way:

That table describes the structure, not the outcome. Whether a month of Wealth or Officer helps a chart depends on everything else in it, which is the job of a full reading starting from your Day Master.

Qi Men Dun Jia: Yin Dun 6, 9 and 3

Qi Men Dun Jia assigns every solar term three structures, or Ju (局), one for each of its three yuan. Han Lu's are Yin Dun 6, 9 and 3. The equinox term before it used 7, 1 and 4; Shuang Jiang after it will use 5, 8 and 2.

"Yin Dun" means the charts are cast in the descending half of the year that began at the June solstice (see Yin and Yang Dun), and it will stay that way until the December solstice. Which of the three structures a given day uses is decided by that day's place in the sixty-day cycle — the three yuan — not by the calendar date, so two days either side of Han Lu can read different structures even though they share a term.

Those three numbers are the classical ones, and you do not have to take them on trust. Five traditional sources in four different formats agree on every row of the table, and a single rule generates all twenty-four rows: each run of three terms belongs to a trigram, the group's first term takes that trigram's palace number as its upper structure, and in Yin Dun each following term steps down by one. The equinox belongs to Dui, palace 7, so the equinox reads 7, Han Lu 6 and Shuang Jiang 5, with the middle and lower structures six and three places further round.

The three pentads, and the Double Ninth

Each solar term divides into three pentads (候, hòu) of about five days, each named for something a person outdoors could see. Han Lu's three, as the almanacs give them:

The third pentad lines up with a date on the other calendar. October 18, 2026 is also the ninth day of the ninth lunar month: Chong Yang (重阳), the Double Ninth Festival. Nine is the highest yang number, doubled; the customs are climbing to a high place, carrying dogwood, and drinking chrysanthemum wine. So the solar calendar's chrysanthemum pentad and the lunar calendar's chrysanthemum festival begin on the same day this year, arrived at by two clocks that run independently.

Han Lu itself falls on the twenty-eighth day of the eighth lunar month, thirteen days after the Mid-Autumn Festival.

What changes on October 8, in one list

• The Ba Zi month turns from the Fire Rooster to the Earth Dog at 14:29 Beijing time, not at midnight.
• The year and month form a half Fire combination (Horse and Dog) for the whole month.
• Qi Men Dun Jia moves to the Yin Dun 6, 9, 3 structures.
• The monthly Flying Star chart re-flies at the same instant, with 9 in the centre for the month. We cover what that does to each sector in Flying Star Feng Shui for October 2026.

Every time on this page — the term instants, the month boundaries, the lunar dates — comes from the same engines that run the Ba Zi calculator and Cosmic Weather. The whole year's terms are laid out in the 2026 Almanac.

For reflection, education and entertainment. The solar terms and Ba Zi are traditional calendar systems, not predictions about outcomes.