Vietnamese lunar new year

what is chinese new year

Chinese New Year is Spring Festival: day one of lunar month one in the Chinese lunisolar count. In ordinary English it is the same new moon many neighbouring festivals also use. In 2026 that civil first day was Tuesday 17 February, a Horse year. That morning is gone. The next Chinese first day is Saturday 6 February 2027, a Goat year, one hundred and fifty-six days from Thursday 3 September 2026. Tết sits on that same lunar turn in ordinary years. It is not a failed copy of Beijing’s holiday. It is Vietnam’s own feast with its own table, flowers, and state leave.

What is Chinese New Year, on this page, is the question people type when they want the East Asian lunar new year and have not yet named Tết. The honest split is: one shared new moon, two countries, two kitchens. A red envelope in Guangzhou and lì xì in Hanoi are cousins. They are not the same packet. A lion dance in a mall in February is not proof you kept either festival.

Work and school in Vietnam number the civil year in Gregorian figures, as China does. The festival follows mùng 1 tháng Giêng. You can keep 1 January and still keep Tết. You cannot move bánh chưng to 31 December and call the job done.

What Tết actually puts on the table

The work starts before giao thừa, the midnight turn. Families clean, settle debts they mean to settle, and visit the kitchen god in the days before the new moon. Northern tables often make bánh chưng, the square sticky-rice cake. Southern tables often make bánh tét, the cylindrical cousin. Peach blossom is the northern flower; yellow mai is the southern one. The ancestor altar is not décor. It is the reason many people travel, even when the trains are full.

Giao thừa is the eve: Friday 5 February 2027 for the next Tết. Mùng 1 is Saturday 6 February 2027, year Đinh Mùi, the Goat. Lì xì is lucky money in a packet, usually for children and younger relatives.

Xông đất is the first visitor through the door; households treat that arrival as a tone for the year. The outgoing 2026 Horse year began on 17 February; that Tết is already past. Vietnam’s labour code gives a statutory Tết rest. The government then publishes each year’s extra days and any make-up Saturdays. As of early September 2026 the 2027 leave block had been proposed in two options by the Ministry of Home Affairs and had not been issued as a final nationwide timetable on this page’s evidence. Do not freeze a nine-day rumour into a ticket. Read the decision when it is gazetted. The festival morning remains 6 February whether the office rest is five days or ten.

If you greet Tết with a mandarin and a couplet copied from a Chinese supermarket, you have borrowed a colour, not kept Vietnam’s year.

Same moon, different country

Korean Seollal also uses a related lunar new year. It is not Tết either. A spreadsheet column labelled “Asian New Year” is how a greeting lands on the wrong porch. In 2027 the civil first day lines up across China, Vietnam, and several neighbours on 6 February. Alignment of the square does not merge the rites. Chúc Mừng Năm Mới is the Vietnamese wish. It is not interchangeable with every other language’s sentence just because the moon is the same.

Diaspora households that cook one cake, video-call grandparents, and give a small packet are still keeping Tết. A person who buys a paper dragon in July is shopping. The next first day from this Thursday is 6 February 2027. Count the days. Book the journey to the house where the altar actually is, not to a city that will be empty because everyone went home.