Xin Hai · Yin Metal Pig

Meaning

Xin Hai washes the jewel in the Pig’s early winter water, the Di Tian Sui’s own image of a metal brought out by water. The tradition reads sincerity and a bright, frank loyalty.

Xin over Hai: yin Metal over yin Water, a stem that produces its branch, as Metal produces Water.

Xin, Yin Metal, is the jewel and the fine blade: refined, precise, shining when it is washed clean. The Pig is generous, sincere and good-natured.

The zodiac reads a Xin Hai year as the Metal Pig’s. The Metal Pig is the most determined of the Pigs: sincere, strong, outspoken in friendship. Its loyalty is unshakable, and it learns that not everyone is as straightforward.

Its Na Yin, shared with Geng Xu, is Metal of hairpins and bracelets (釵釧金 chāichuàn jīn): a sound of Metal, heard beside the pillar’s Metal and Water.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1851, 1911, 1971, 2031, 2091 and 2151, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Pig month of every Ding or Ren year, opened by Start of Winter, as in the solar years 2022 and 2027.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 6 February, 7 April, 6 June, 5 August, 4 October and 3 December.
• As an hour: the Pig’s double hour, 21:00–23:00, of Ding and Ren days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Xin, sitting on Hai, the partner palace: Hai holds Ren and Jia, Xin’s Hurting Officer and Direct Wealth, and Xin stands at its Bath 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-i, sinhae and Tân Hợi, with each language’s readings of 辛 and 亥.

How Ulune calculates it

Xin Hai is the 48th of the sixty pillars: the 8th of the ten stems over the 12th 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 Hai belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Chen to Gui Chou, whose stems meet the branches from Chen to Chou and leave out Yin and Mao: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 24th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences