Twelve animals

Meaning

The twelve animals, shēngxiào, are the Rat, the Ox, the Tiger, the Rabbit, the Dragon, the Snake, the Horse, the Goat, the Monkey, the Rooster, the Dog and the Pig. Each is one of the twelve Earthly Branches seen as a living creature, so each carries the branch’s phase, its season, its hour and its direction: the Rat is the Water of midnight and midwinter, the Horse the Fire of noon and midsummer. The word shēngxiào means the likeness of one’s birth.

Most people know one animal, that of their birth year, and it is the zodiac’s first look at a person: how others see them, the generation they share. Ulune reads four, as the four pillars of a birth give them: the year animal, the month animal, the inner one, the day animal, the self with those closest, and the hour animal, the secret one. Together they make a portrait two people born in the same year do not share.

What a portrait says of an animal is the tradition’s image, the quick Rat, the patient Ox, the brave Tiger, gathered from what popular books in Chinese, English and French commonly say, and offered as a mirror to recognise oneself in or not. No animal is better than another, no year good or bad to be born in, and no pair of animals forbidden to each other: the tradition’s relations describe how two animals meet, easily or with friction, never a verdict.

In practice

• On Ulune’s wheel the twelve stand in their compass places, the Rat at the north at the top, the Rabbit at the east, the Horse at the south, the Rooster at the west, and a reader’s four animals are marked on it, with this year’s and this month’s.
• The relations: animals in harmony, the six pairs of partners; allies of one trine, three animals four places apart (the Rat, the Dragon and the Monkey); and the tensions: the clash of opposites across the wheel, the harms, the punishments and the destructions (relations).
• Each year has its animal from Lichun, about 4 February: 2026 is the Horse’s. The year animal meets it in its own way, as its own year, in a clash, a harm, a punishment, a destruction, or in harmony or a trine; the Cycles lens reads the year ahead that way, month by month.
• Each animal has five phases over sixty years, from the year’s stem: a Wood, a Fire, an Earth, a Metal and a Water Horse, twelve years apart; Ulune’s sixty portraits of an animal with a phase read them, as popular astrology does with the Metal Horse or the Water Rabbit.
• Two people are read animal by animal, the year animals first, then the day animals, the closest bond; and the Calendar shows each day’s animal and the one it clashes with.

Across traditions

• Japan, Korea and Vietnam share the twelve, with a few changes: Japan’s Pig is a wild boar and its Goat a sheep; Vietnam has the Cat in place of the Rabbit and the water buffalo for the Ox.
• Across Asia the cycle travelled with the calendar: Tibetans, Mongols and Turkic peoples counted years by the twelve animals, and through the Mongol empire the “Turkish years” reached Persia, where official documents named years by them until the calendar reform of 1925.
• The Western zodiac is also, by its Greek name, a circle of little animals, zōidia; but its twelve signs divide the Sun’s yearly path, while the Chinese twelve count years, months, days and hours alike.

Origin and history

The animals are younger than the branches they stand for. The day books of the Qin dynasty found at Shuihudi, written about 217 BC, give each branch an animal for divination, some of them unlike today’s, and other manuscripts of the time vary again. Wang Chong’s Lunheng, in the 1st century, is the first text to give all twelve as they are now, in arguments over whether the animals’ natures explain anything; by the Tang dynasty, sets of twelve figures with animal heads were placed in tombs, and in the 18th century Jesuit designers gave the Qianlong emperor’s summer palace a fountain of twelve bronze animal heads, one spouting water at each double hour.

The legend most people tell is younger still: the Jade Emperor called a race, and the animals took their places in the order they arrived, the Rat first, riding on the Ox’s back and jumping ahead at the line, the Pig last; versions explain why the Cat is missing. BaZi’s classics, the Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui, read the branches rather than the animals; the animal portraits that fill modern books, such as Theodora Lau’s Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes (1979), grew from folk sayings in the 20th century.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune finds the four animals from the four pillars of a birth, each animal being its pillar’s branch. The year animal changes at the exact moment of Lichun, the Sun at 315°, as BaZi and Feng Shui count; when Chinese New Year would give another animal, which happens for births between late January and mid-February, the page says so and gives both. The month animal follows the solar months, the day animal the count of days, the hour animal the double hour of the birth, on true solar time at the birthplace and with the day turning at 23:00 by default; Settings offer the other clocks and boundaries. The phase of each animal is its branch’s, the phase of a year animal’s pillar its stem’s, and the relations are computed by the classical rules on the branches’ places.

Correspondences