# 1980 Chinese Zodiac: Metal Monkey, Years and Compatibility

1980 is the year of the Metal Monkey, term 57 of the sixty. One label, three lengths: 366, 365 and 355 days, with the two new-year lines eleven days apart.

- Canonical: https://gptbazi.com/blog/1980-chinese-zodiac
- Language: English
- Published: 2026-10-20T09:30:00+08:00
- Updated: 2026-10-20T10:13:22+08:00
- Author: Ziheng — https://gptbazi.com/author/ziheng

> GPTbazi is a personality map for entertainment and self-reflection. It is not medical, legal, financial, or psychological advice, and it is not a prediction of events. Calendar dates and solar-term boundaries are astronomical and official calendar facts, not readings of a person.

## 1980 is a Metal Monkey year

1980 is written 庚申 (Geng-shen): 庚, the seventh of the ten heavenly stems, over 申, the ninth of the twelve earthly branches. That puts it at term 57 of the sixty. The stem carries metal, so the animal in front of it is a Metal Monkey and not a plain one. Nothing else about the year follows from that sentence: the stem supplies the element word, and then it is finished.

The year's two edges are eleven days apart, and they do not fall in the order most people assume. Li Chun, the term that opens spring, arrives on 5 February 1980. Lunar New Year's Day arrives on 16 February. So from 5 to 15 February a birth chart has already turned the animal over to the Monkey while the national standard is still reading the Goat.

Most of this page is arithmetic that starts from those two dates, because asking how long 1980 is produces three defensible answers: 366 days, 365 days, 355 days. All three are right. They are counting three different things that all carry the same label, and the shortest of them is not the one most people would pick.

The next section gives the branch's relations. After that: the three counts side by side, then the two boundaries day by day, then what the shortest count is made of. Every figure on the page can be checked against a public table with one subtraction.

## 1980 Compatibility: Six Harmony, Clash and Trine

The year gives one branch and nothing else — 申 Shen, the Monkey. The three relations below follow from that branch alone: they hold for every birth whose year branch is 申, and they do not depend on the month, the day or the hour.

| Relation | Branch | Animal |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Six harmony (六合) | 巳 Si | Snake |
| Clash (相冲) | 寅 Yin | Tiger |
| Three harmony (三合) | 子 and 辰 | Rat, Dragon |

A chart reads the four branches against each other, not the year branch on its own. [The 144-pair table](/blog/chinese-zodiac-compatibility-chart) has every pair.

## Three lengths for one year

Counting the first and the last day in, the three counts come out like this.

| Count | First day | Last day | Days |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Civil year 1980 | 1 January | 31 December | 366 days |
| Chart year, Geng-shen | 5 February | 3 February 1981 | 365 days |
| Lunar year, Geng-shen | 16 February | 4 February 1981 | 355 days |

The rows do not contradict each other. They answer three questions. The first is how many days the civil year has, and 1980 is a leap year, so 366. The second is how many days run from one Li Chun to the next. The third is how many run from one Lunar New Year's Day to the next. Only the second and third have anything to do with the animal; the first is the ordinary calendar year, and it is in the table because it is what most people mean by "1980".

## The year that holds 29 February and still runs short

Here is the part that looks like a mistake. 1980 contains 29 February. A year with a leap day in it should be the long one, and the civil year is: 366 days. But from 5 February 1980 to 3 February 1981 there are 365 days, so the count that carries the label loses a day to the count that carries nothing but the number.

The exchange is exact, and it happens at both ends. The civil year opens on 1 January, so 35 days pass before Li Chun on 5 February, and then 331 more carry it to 31 December. The chart year throws those 35 days away and picks up 34 at the far end, 1 January to 3 February 1981. Thirty-five out, thirty-four in: one day short, and the leap day never enters the sum.

Why the far end stops on the 3rd: the next Li Chun falls on 4 February 1981, a calendar day earlier than 1980's 5 February. A tropical year is about a quarter of a day longer than 365, so the term drifts across 3, 4 and 5 February instead of settling on one of them. Two consecutive Li Chun days can be 365 or 366 days apart; this pair is 365, and the year closes the day before the second one.

So 庚申 covers 5 February 1980 to 3 February 1981 on a chart and 16 February 1980 to 4 February 1981 under the national standard. Both contain 29 February. Neither is a day longer for it, because neither of them starts on 1 January.

## 5 February against 16 February

A zodiac year does not begin on 1 January, and the day it does begin on has no single answer. China's national standard for the calendar, GB/T 33661-2017, drafted by the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, starts the lunar year at the first month, and the animal year shares that reference: the animal changes on Lunar New Year's Day. Chart-reading changes the sexagenary year at Li Chun, the solar term that opens spring.

In 1980 the two lines fall 11 days apart, and this year Li Chun comes first: Li Chun is 5 February and Lunar New Year's Day is 16 February. That means chart-reading changes the animal 11 days before the national standard does.

[Chinese Zodiac Year Boundary](/blog/chinese-zodiac-year-boundary-dates) lists both lines for every year from 1940 to 2030, with the gap in days for each.

## Twelve days, eleven of them undecided

12 calendar days in 1980 sit on or between the two lines, and 11 of them are read differently depending on which convention is in play.

| Date in 1980 | Under the national standard | Under chart-reading |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 5 February – 15 February (11 days) | Goat | Monkey |
| 16 February | Monkey | Monkey |

The 11 days from 5 February are the contested ones. The standard still counts them inside 1979, whose animal is the Goat, because Lunar New Year has not arrived; chart-reading has already changed the year at Li Chun on 5 February. On 16 February the two lines meet: that day is Lunar New Year's Day itself, the first day of the Monkey year under the standard, and chart-reading has been there since Li Chun. From then on both conventions read the same animal.

A birth on the boundary day itself is the harder case, because Li Chun is a moment rather than a day. The page linked above explains why it gives days and not times.

## What the 355 days are made of

The lunar year that opens on 16 February 1980 is not a leap year. It has twelve months and no thirteenth, and seven of the twelve run thirty days while five run twenty-nine. That is 355 days, and it is the shortest of the three.

The boundaries sit in the same file, one line each: the second month opens on 17 March, the third on 15 April, the fourth on 14 May, the fifth on 13 June, the sixth on 12 July, the seventh on 11 August, the eighth on 9 September, the ninth on 9 October, the tenth on 8 November, the eleventh on 7 December and the twelfth on 6 January 1981. Read the gaps down that column and the long and short months come out 30, 29, 29, 30, 29, 30, 29, 30, 30, 29, 30, 30.

The late start is the previous year's account. The lunar year before this one, 1979 己未, ran 384 days and carried a thirteenth month. Add 384 days to 28 January 1979 and the answer is 16 February 1980: nineteen days further into the calendar than a 365-day year would have put it. A late New Year is not a rule about February; it is last year's surplus arriving.

That is also where the label hands over. 4 February 1981 is the last day of the lunar year and the day Li Chun arrives; 5 February opens the next year under the national standard. The two conventions hand over on consecutive days, and a birth on either of them is the case this page does not settle, because Li Chun is a moment and not a whole day.

## Checking the 1980 dates yourself

The Observatory publishes one plain-text file per year — T1980e.txt for the year itself and T1981e.txt for the far end — a line for every day: the Gregorian date, the lunar month number whenever a month opens that day, the weekday, and any solar term falling on it. Four lines carry this page. 5 February 1980 prints Spring Commences. 16 February prints 1st Lunar month. 6 January 1981 prints 12th Lunar month, the last of the twelve, and it comes from the 1981 file. 4 February 1981 prints Spring Commences again.

The three lengths are three subtractions. 31 December 1980 minus 1 January 1980, plus one, is 366. 3 February 1981 minus 5 February 1980, plus one, is 365. 4 February 1981 minus 16 February 1980, plus one, is 355. Nothing in those three lines depends on a table of animals.

Worth saying what the label is not, because most writing about animal years implies more. 庚申 marks a birth year and a place in a count that keeps running. It says nothing about how the year went for anyone and nothing about how a person born in it will turn out; there is no body of evidence behind a claim of that kind, so this page leaves it out.

No clock time is given for either boundary, deliberately. A solar term falls on a day, and the same authoritative source does not carry the hour across the span these pages cover, so the page gives the day rather than filling the hour in from a different kind of source. A birth on one of the boundary days is the case this page cannot settle, and it says so instead of guessing.

## Where the 1980 dates come from

Li Chun, Lunar New Year's Day and every lunar month start are read from the Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Tables for 1979, 1980 and 1981. The two headings quoted near the top are that table's own first lines, English and Chinese. The 366, 365 and 355 figures are differences between dates in those files, not estimates.

The lunar months themselves are compiled under GB/T 33661-2017, the national standard drafted by the Purple Mountain Observatory. [Chinese Zodiac Year Boundary](/blog/chinese-zodiac-year-boundary-dates) lists both year edges for every year from 1940 to 2030 with the gap in days, and [Monkey](/blog/monkey-chinese-zodiac) covers the animal on its own, including why this is the one Monkey year with a name in use. [How we cite](/how-we-cite) sets out how sources are chosen and dated here.

The full table behind this page — 1901 to 2100 — is published as a free dataset: [chinese zodiac year boundaries](/zodiac-dates).

## Key points

- 1980 is 庚申, Geng-shen: the seventh heavenly stem over the ninth earthly branch, term 57 of the sixty, and metal, so a Metal Monkey. The classical six-harmony tables pair Shen, the Monkey, with Si, the Snake; the clash table sets it against Yin, the Tiger, and its three-harmony ring is Shen–Zi–Chen — the Monkey with the Rat and the Dragon.
- The same label covers 366 days (the civil year), 365 days (one Li Chun to the next) and 355 days (one Lunar New Year to the next).
- The chart year contains 29 February 1980 and still runs one day shorter than the civil year: it drops the 35 days before Li Chun and picks up only 34 after 31 December.
- Li Chun falls on 5 February and Lunar New Year on 16 February, so 5 to 15 February read Monkey on a chart and Goat under the national standard: eleven days.
- The lunar year has twelve months, seven of thirty days and five of twenty-nine, with no thirteenth month.

## Sources

- Hong Kong Observatory — Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table for 1980 (the file this page reads) — https://www.hko.gov.hk/en/gts/time/calendar/text/files/T1980e.txt (accessed 2026-10-20)
- Hong Kong Observatory — Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table (year index) — https://www.hko.gov.hk/en/gts/time/conversion1_text.htm (accessed 2026-10-20)
- GB/T 33661-2017 《农历的编算和颁行》 — national standard record (drafted by the Purple Mountain Observatory; in force 1 September 2017) — https://std.samr.gov.cn/gb/search/gbDetailed?id=71F772D817FDD3A7E05397BE0A0AB82A (accessed 2026-10-20)
- Guangming Online (光明网) — what GB/T 33661-2017 fixes as the start and end of a zodiac year — https://m.gmw.cn/2024-02/08/content_1303656542.htm (accessed 2026-10-20)
- Hong Kong Observatory — 1980 年公曆與農曆日期對照表 (the Chinese table whose heading prints 庚申 next to 肖猴) — https://www.hko.gov.hk/tc/gts/time/calendar/text/files/T1980c.txt (accessed 2026-10-20)
- Hong Kong Observatory — Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table for 1981 (read for the Li Chun on 4 February and the Lunar New Year on 5 February, which close this year's counts) — https://www.hko.gov.hk/en/gts/time/calendar/text/files/T1981e.txt (accessed 2026-10-20)
- GPTbazi — BaZi methodology and the solar-term boundary — https://gptbazi.com/about (accessed 2026-10-20)
- GPTbazi — how sources are chosen and dated — https://gptbazi.com/how-we-cite (accessed 2026-10-20)

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