Year animal

Meaning

The year animal is the animal of the year of birth: the branch of the year pillar, seen as one of the twelve animals. It is the one most people know, the answer to “what are you?”, “I’m a Horse”, and the one families count by: in a single household, the grandparents, the parents and the children often have their animals said in one breath.

The tradition reads it as the outermost of the four animals: how others see a person at first, and the roots they come from, their family and the generation they share, for everyone born in the same solar year has the same year animal. The year pillar, in BaZi, stands for the ancestors and the early years; Chinese astrology keeps that sense of a ground one starts from rather than a self one becomes.

Each year animal also has its phase, from the year’s stem, which makes sixty kinds in all: the Metal Horse of 1990 and the Fire Horse of 2026 share the Horse’s energy, but not its colour. Ulune reads both: the animal’s portrait, and the pair of the animal with its phase, and says, as everywhere, that they are mirrors to recognise oneself in or not.

In practice

• The four animals: the year animal is read first, then the month animal, the inner one, the day animal, the self with those closest, and the hour animal, the secret one; the year animal says least about the person and most about where they stand among others.
• The year ahead: each year has its own animal, its ruler Tai Sui, and the year animal meets it in one of the tradition’s ways: as its own year, in a clash, a harm, a punishment or a destruction, or in harmony or a trine; the Cycles lens reads the year and its months that way.
• Two people: the Relationship lens compares the year animals first, as most people would, then the day animals, the closest bond; and the Calendar marks the days whose animal clashes with the year animal, as the almanacs do.
• Two answers: counted from Lichun, as BaZi and Feng Shui count, the year animal changes about 4 February; counted from Chinese New Year, as most people learned it, between 21 January and 20 February. A child born on 10 February 2026 is a Fire Horse by Lichun and still a Snake by the New Year, which fell on 17 February; Ulune gives both and says which it reads.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology the sign everyone knows is the Sun sign, the sign of the month of birth; the Chinese year animal is shared by a whole year’s births, and so says more about a generation and less about a season.
• In Japan the year animal decorates the New Year cards, nengajō, that every household sends; in Korea people ask each other’s tti, their animal, to know their age; in Vietnam each Tết opens the year of a new animal, with the Cat in place of the Rabbit.
• The phase of the year is the Chinese counterpart of a generation’s colour: a person born in 1990 is a Metal Horse, one born in 2026 a Fire Horse, and the tradition reads the two as cousins rather than twins.

Origin and history

Naming years by the twelve branches began with astronomy: Jupiter, the year star, takes about twelve years to go round the sky, and the Erya, in the 3rd century BC, records the old names of the years by the branch in which Jupiter’s counterpart, Tai Sui, stood. The animals came to the branches by the Han dynasty, as Wang Chong’s Lunheng shows in the 1st century, and with them the habit of saying one’s year by an animal, which every Chinese generation since has kept.

BaZi’s classics, from the Yuanhai Ziping of the Song dynasty to the San Ming Tong Hui of the Ming, set the year pillar’s change at Lichun, the start of spring, not at New Year, and that is the rule the Four Pillars follow. The year animal as the centre of a popular astrology, with its portraits and its compatibilities, is younger, the work of 20th-century books in Chinese, English and French, such as Theodora Lau’s Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes (1979).

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune finds the solar year of a birth, the Gregorian year whose Lichun opened it, and its pillar: the branch counts from the Rat in 2020, twelve years round, and the stem from Jia in years ending in 4. The year changes at the exact moment of Lichun, the Sun at 315°, as an instant, so no clock or time zone can move it; a birth within five minutes of that instant is marked as uncertain, since a birth time a little off could give the year before or after. Ulune also works out the Chinese New Year of the birthplace’s calendar date and, when it gives another animal, says so on the page.

Correspondences