1984 Chinese Zodiac: Wood Rat, Years and Compatibility

Jia-zi: first on both rows

1984 is written 甲子 (Jia-zi). Jia is the first of the ten heavenly stems and Zi the first of the twelve earthly branches, so the pair is first on both rows at once, which makes it the first term of the sixty. Across the ninety years this family covers, 1984 is the only one that lands there.

Nothing mystical fixes that. The count is a running total that never stops: subtract 4 from the year, divide by 60, take the remainder. From 1984 that leaves 1980, which is thirty-three sixties exactly, so the year is term one. 1924 gives the same remainder and the same pair, and so does 2044; every year between them simply kept counting.

Jia carries yang wood and Zi carries water. Water feeds wood, so the branch supplies what the stem grows on, and the element word in front of the animal is taken from the stem: 1984 is a Wood Rat, a rat with wood in front of it rather than a tree that turned into one.

Two relations hang off the branch and both are checkable. The six-harmony partner of Zi is Chou, the Ox — which happens to be the animal of 1985, one of the years next door. The clash partner is Wu, the Horse, six places along. And in the water ring Shen-Zi-Chen, Zi is the branch at full strength: neither the one that gives the phase birth nor the one that stores it.

The pair comes back every sixty years: 1924, 1984, 2044. Everything below concerns the second of the three.

1984 Compatibility: Six Harmony, Clash and Trine

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

A chart reads the four branches against each other, not the year branch on its own. The 144-pair table has every pair.

The five years next door run on the same count

A position is worth little unless it can be checked against something else. This page has a short check available: five neighbouring years already carry pages of their own here, and each one states its pair.

1985 is Yi-chou, the second term. 1986 is Bing-yin, the third. 1987 is Ding-mao, the fourth. 1988 is Wu-chen, the fifth. 1989 is Ji-si, the sixth. Five consecutive terms, sitting immediately behind the first — the whole run is one step away from where this page starts.

Four dates are enough to put the three Jia-zi years and the year before them side by side:

The same arithmetic runs backwards. 1983, the year before, closed the previous cycle as Gui-hai, the sixtieth term. 1982 was Ren-xu, the fifty-ninth; 1980 was Geng-shen, the fifty-seventh; 1979 was Ji-wei, the fifty-sixth; 1977 was Ding-si, the fifty-fourth. Four of those five years also have pages here, and not one of them needs a different rule.

Which is the honest version of "the cycle restarts". The count does not stop at the end of 1983 and open again in 1984; it never stopped. 1984 is where a running total happens to come out even — a landmark in the arithmetic, not a break in it.

The month pillars climb the same ladder

The year pillar is not the only thing the count governs. Month pillars are named the same way, and their stems are derived from the year stem by a rule the Ming handbooks put in a song: in a Jia or Ji year, the first month starts at Bing.

So the twelve month pillars of 1984 are Bing-yin, Ding-mao, Wu-chen, Ji-si, Geng-wu, Xin-wei, Ren-shen, Gui-you, Jia-xu, Yi-hai, Bing-zi and Ding-chou. In the sixty-term count those are positions three through fourteen: twelve consecutive terms, in order, with nothing repeated.

Ten stems across twelve months forces two of them to appear twice — Bing at the front and again at the eleventh, Ding at the second and the twelfth — while Wu through Yi appear once each. The chain opens at Li Chun on 4 February, and its last link opens with Minor Cold on 5 January 1985.

1984 is also a Gregorian leap year: 366 days, with a 29 February on which no solar term falls. Spring Showers is on 19 February and the spring equinox on 20 March, so the extra day moves nothing. What it does lengthen is the Jia-zi year as a chart counts it, from Li Chun 1984 to the day before Li Chun 1985: 366 days rather than 365.

2 February against 4 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 1984 the two lines fall 2 days apart, and this year Lunar New Year comes first: Li Chun is 4 February and Lunar New Year's Day is 2 February. That means the national standard changes the animal 2 days before chart-reading does.

Chinese Zodiac Year Boundary lists both lines for every year from 1940 to 2030, with the gap in days for each.

A window three days wide

3 calendar days in 1984 sit on or between the two lines, and 2 of them are read differently depending on which convention is in play.

The 2 days from 2 February are the contested ones. The standard moved the year on 2 February, at Lunar New Year's Day, so it reads those 2 days as Rat; chart-reading waits for Li Chun on 4 February, and until then they stay in 1983, the year of the Pig. On 4 February the two lines meet: that day is Li Chun, and chart-reading has changed to the Rat year as well. 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.

A tenth month, twice, and 1985 pays for it

The Observatory's table for 1984 repeats one label. The line for 24 October reads "10th Lunar month", and so does the line for 23 November, after which the count resumes with the eleventh month on 22 December. The Chinese table is explicit about the second of the two: 閏十月, a leap tenth month.

The first tenth month runs from 24 October to 22 November, thirty days, and it catches a mid-month term on its own last day — Light Snow on 22 November. The second runs from 23 November to 21 December, twenty-nine days, and catches nothing: the next mid-month term, the winter solstice, falls on 22 December, the first day of the eleventh month.

That single emptiness is the whole reason it is the copy. GB/T 33661-2017 makes the month containing the winter solstice the eleventh, and where thirteen months sit between one eleventh month and the next, the first month with no mid-month term becomes the leap one. Here the two eleventh months open on 4 December 1983 and 22 December 1984, thirteen months lie between them, and walking the list only one is empty.

A leap tenth month is rare even by the standards of leap months. Across the ninety lunar years from 1940 to 2029 there are thirty-three leap years, and the extra month only ever falls in months two through ten. Month ten happens exactly once: 1984.

The bill for the extra month lands on 1985. Because this lunar year runs 384 days from 2 February 1984, the next Lunar New Year arrives on 20 February 1985 — the latest first-of-first-month in those ninety years. A late new year leaves Li Chun comparatively early, so in 1985 the two lines fall sixteen days apart: the widest gap in the family and in the whole span.

Checking the 1984 dates yourself

The Observatory publishes one plain-text table per year, and the file for 1984 is T1984e.txt. Each line carries a date, the lunar month whenever a month opens on that day, the weekday, and any solar term falling on it. Six lines settle this page: 2 February opens the first lunar month; 4 February carries Spring Commences; 24 October and 23 November both open a tenth month; 22 November carries Light Snow on the last day of the first of them; and 22 December opens the eleventh month with Winter Solstice on the same line.

The remainder takes one line of arithmetic and no table at all. Four back from 1984 is 1980, which is thirty-three sixties, so 1984 is term one, 1983 is term sixty, and 2044 is term one again. Any source that gives 1984 a different pair is wrong on that point, whatever else it gets right.

What the label carries is worth stating plainly, because most writing about animal years implies more. 1984 identifies a birth year and, with the stem and branch, one position in a count that runs without end. It says nothing about how that year went for anyone, and nothing about how a person born in it will fare; there is no body of evidence behind a forecast of that kind, so this page does not print one. Dates and labels can be checked. The rest would be invention.

No clock time is given for either boundary here, deliberately: a solar term falls on a day, and the same authoritative source does not carry the hour across the whole 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 two boundary days is the one case this page cannot settle, and it says so instead of guessing.

Where the 1984 dates come from

Li Chun, Lunar New Year's Day, the start of every lunar month and both of the tenth months are read from the Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table for 1984 and for the years on either side of it; the 384-day figure is that table's own month lengths added together, not an estimate.

The insertion rule is clauses 4.3 and 4.4 of GB/T 33661-2017, 《农历的编算和颁行》, published in full by the national standards service. The rule that gives a Jia year its first month at Bing comes from 論遁月時 in volume two of the Ming compendium 三命通会; the six-harmony and clash pairings come from 論支元六合 and 論衝擊 in the same volume. Chinese Zodiac Year Boundary lists both year edges for every year from 1940 to 2030 with the gap in days, and Rat covers the animal on its own. 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.