chinese-calendar

What it is and what it does

chinese-calendar is a Python library that answers a single, practical question: is a given date a working day or a holiday in China? It encodes the official holiday schedules published by China's State Council, covering 2004 through 2026, and includes special handling for adjustments like the 2020 Spring Festival extension. The library provides three main functions: checking if a date is a holiday or workday, retrieving the holiday name when applicable, and identifying whether a holiday falls on a makeup workday (调休).

The package has no external runtime dependencies and installs as a pure Python wheel. It is actively maintained and typically receives updates around November each year to incorporate the next year's official holiday schedule. With 1366 GitHub stars, it serves developers building Chinese business applications, scheduling systems, and calendar tools that need to respect China's official working calendar.

Use it for:

• Validate whether a date is a working day in China for payroll, leave-tracking, or HR systems.
• Build a calendar UI that highlights Chinese holidays and makeup workdays for end users.
• Filter or exclude holidays from business logic in financial or trading applications operating in China.
• Generate reports or analytics that account for China's official holiday schedule.
• Implement scheduling or availability systems that respect Chinese working days.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Determines whether a specific date in China is a working day or holiday, with support for 2004–2026 and knowledge of official government holiday schedules including adjustments.

Yes. The package solves a specific, well-defined problem for any application serving Chinese users or businesses. It has no dependencies, installs instantly, carries a permissive license, and is actively maintained with a clear update cadence tied to official announcements. Install it if you need to check Chinese holidays; skip it if your application has no China-specific calendar logic.

Install

chinese-calendar on PyPI

pip install chinese-calendar

uv add chinese-calendar

poetry add chinese-calendar

Installing chinese-calendar

Before you install

Low friction: pure Python wheel with no runtime dependencies. Actively maintained with last commit on 2026-06-06 and a recent release on 2025-11-04; updates typically follow official State Council holiday announcements around November each year.

License in practice

MIT License permits commercial and private use with minimal restrictions; you may use, modify, and distribute the package freely provided you retain the license notice.

Quickstart

import datetime
from chinese_calendar import is_holiday, is_workday, get_holiday_detail

date = datetime.date(2018, 4, 30)
print(is_holiday(date))  # True
print(is_workday(date))  # False
on_holiday, name = get_holiday_detail(date)

Verify before relying

• Whether the package handles leap seconds or other edge cases in date arithmetic.
• Exact behavior when querying dates outside the 2004–2026 range.
• Performance characteristics for bulk queries across many dates.

Package facts

Evidence: chinese_calendar-1.11.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Tags

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