Friday, August 13, 2010

A Cursory Overview Of Chinese Gender Calendars

By James Chung

There are many cultures around the world where the birth of a baby boy is preferred to that of a baby girl. Even though both are equally as rewarding a blessing from God to their parents such has been the mind set of numerous people and continues to be even until now. China is one of those nations where this way of thinking has existed and to some extent still prevails.

There are numerous reasons that make people to think like that. With regards to the Chinese culture it was the fact that they were an agricultural society and hence fathers needed their young lads to help them out with their daily toiling in the land and eventually take over the job. A baby girl on the other hand would be brought up in a different way and much of her material contribution would be limited to the boundaries of her house.

According to parents, girls were not as helpful as boys were and they therefore considered them expensive to look after until they reached the age of marriage. They thought of boys as needed assistants and the other reason that contributed to this belief in Chinese traditions was that boys were the only children who would inherit their father's legacy. They were eager to know the baby's gender before the mother conceived and the Chinese invented a strange science, which claimed that it could predict whether a baby was a boy or girl.

The Chinese did not invent the ultrasound many hundreds of years ago, but rather an instrument they called the gender calendar. This mysterious invention has many other names but its main goal worked in the prediction of the gender of an unborn baby.

Whether the gender calendar is accurate or not, it receives credit as the first method of attempting to determine a baby's sex before birth. This calendar was discovered around seven thousand years ago. Chinese history records that the person who invented the gender calendar was a scientist from China and people retrieved the calendar system from a tomb near the scientist's grave.

Even though history records that the invention of the gender calendar took place seventy centuries ago, people found it only seven centuries ago near Beijing City. After this, people replicated this invention often but the first manuscript of the gender calendar is kept in Beijing's Institute of Science.

In order to control population increase in China, the government passed a formal law encouraging parents to have a single child only. The government assisted Chinese parents to do so by asking them to use the valuable gender calendar to assist those expecting a child in their attempt to determine their baby's sex before its birth.

Actually, the gender calendar predicts the gender of the baby long before people estimate a woman to conceive. This prediction has a success rate of ninety percent according to statistics recorded in China.

The main scientific workings of the gender calendar come from the moon's cycles. The calendar relates the mother's age to the month when she conceived to come up with a likely conclusion.

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