Xin Chou · Yin Metal Ox

Meaning

Xin Chou keeps the jewel in the Ox’s winter earth, the storehouse of Metal, which produces and protects it. The tradition reads a will of iron with a fine edge: constancy, principle, and value kept safe until its time.

Xin over Chou: yin Metal over yin Earth, a stem its branch produces, as Earth produces Metal.

Xin, Yin Metal, is the jewel and the fine blade: refined, precise, shining when it is washed clean. The Ox is patient, steady and strong.

The zodiac reads a Xin Chou year as the Metal Ox’s. The Metal Ox has a will of iron: hard-working, principled, unshakable once it has decided. Its constancy earns respect, and it gains by bending a little when others see things differently.

Its Na Yin, shared with Geng Zi, is Earth on the wall (壁上土 bìshàng tǔ): a sound of Earth, heard beside the pillar’s Metal and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1841, 1901, 1961, 2021, 2081 and 2141, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Ox month of every Bing or Xin year, opened by Minor Cold, as in the solar years 2021 and 2026.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 27 January, 28 March, 27 May, 26 July, 24 September and 23 November.
• As an hour: the Ox’s double hour, 01:00–03:00, of Ding and Ren days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Xin, sitting on Chou, the partner palace: Chou holds Ji, Gui and Xin, Xin’s Indirect Resource, Eating God and Companion, and Xin stands at its Nurture stage there.
• As a luck pillar or a year, it brings each Day Master the god of its stem and the god of its branch’s main qi: the Correspondences below give them for all ten.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the same pillar is kanoto-ushi, sinchuk and Tân Sửu, with each language’s readings of 辛 and 丑.

How Ulune calculates it

Xin Chou is the 38th of the sixty pillars: the 8th of the ten stems over the 2nd of the twelve branches, which the cycle moves on one step together, so that a stem only ever meets the branches of its polarity. Ulune counts a year’s pillar from Lichun, 1984 being Jia Zi; a month’s twelve a year through the cycle, from Bing Yin in the Tiger month of 1984 (the rule of the five tigers); a day’s by the count of days, 1 January 2000 being Wu Wu; an hour’s twelve a day (the rule of the five rats).

Xin Chou belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Wu to Gui Mao, whose stems meet the branches from Wu to Mao and leave out Chen and Si: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 19th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences