Monkey 2027: Four Years Empty Out of Twelve

The short answer

2027 is 丁未, the year of the Goat. If your birth year branch is 申, the Monkey, nothing on any of the five relation tables connects you to it.

No 六合 harmony, since that pairing belongs to 巳. No 冲 clash, which is 寅. No 刑 punishment, which runs through 寅, 巳 and 申 between them. No 破 destruction, which is also 巳. No 害 harm, which is 亥.

That is the whole answer, and the pages that rank for this query do not give it. A template needs a sentence about the Monkey, and the nearest available subject is the Monkey's partners — the Rat is harmed in 2027, and the Rat and the Monkey share a union — so the warning gets inherited from somebody else's year.

Put the twelve years of a Monkey in a row and they divide by three. Four carry a relation that offends the year god, four carry one that works with it, four carry nothing at all. 2027 is one of the last four. Eight of the twelve branches split exactly this way, and the Monkey is one of the eight.

Nine Monkey years, and the age each reaches in 2027

Nine birth years carry 申 as the year branch, from 1920 to 2016. The stem advances two places every twelve years and the branch does not move at all, so the pillar walks through five stems in a fixed rotation.

The ages are 2027 minus the birth year, so each one marks the year a person turns that number rather than a birthday already passed. The next Monkey year is 2028, which puts 2027 at the far end of a cycle rather than near its start.

The twelve years split four, four, four

Count every branch a Monkey can meet as the year branch, including its own, and the twelve fall into three groups of four.

The middle row is the one worth checking, because four is not a coincidence of the Monkey. Every one of the twelve branches has exactly four years that work with it, whichever animal you start from. That row is a constant of the system rather than a property of this sign.

2027 falls in the bottom group. So does 2026, which makes this the second consecutive empty year for anyone born in a Monkey year, with the Monkey's own year following in 2028.

Why only eight of the twelve divide this way

The outer rows are where the branches stop agreeing. Four of them — 子, 丑, 卯 and 戌 — offend the year god in five years rather than four, which leaves three empty years instead of four. The remaining eight, the Monkey among them, sit at four, four, four.

The reason is overlap. The Monkey's punishment partners are 寅 and 巳, and those same two branches are also its clash partner and its destruction partner, so three of the five offending relation types collapse onto two branches. The Rat's four offending relations point at four separate branches — 午 for clash, 卯 for punishment, 未 for harm, 酉 for destruction — so nothing collapses and it spends one extra year on the list.

The consequence is a number a Monkey can check against its own life: four years in twelve carry an offence, five for a Rat. That difference comes from how the lists are built, not from one animal being treated more gently than another.

In 2027 the four branches named come one from each union

The year branch 未 offends four branches in 2027, and they are not neighbours on the board.

Four branches, four different unions, one each. This is what eight of the twelve possible year branches do. The other four — 子, 丑, 卯 and 戌 — name two members of a single union in the same year, which means one group of three takes a double hit while the rest go untouched.

2027 belongs to the first kind, so no union is named twice. The union that holds the Monkey is 申子辰, water. The branch from it that 2027 touches is 子, the Rat. The Monkey and the Dragon are both absent from the table above.

Same union, three different years

A union is a direction and an element. It is not a group that shares a forecast.

Two of the three are empty. Saying the Monkey's year is affected because the Rat's year is affected requires a rule that carries a relation through a third branch, and none of the five tables has one. The tables are point to point: 子 and 未 are listed together, 申 and 未 are not listed at all.

The transmission claim also contradicts the unions themselves. If trouble travelled inside a union, its three members would offend one another, and they do not. Every pair inside 申子辰, 亥卯未, 寅午戌 and 巳酉丑 is a working relation, which is precisely what makes them unions rather than coincidences.

So the accurate sentence about 2027 for a Monkey is the short one. For the longer one to stand it would have to point at the line where the harm between 子 and 未 passes through 申. None of the five tables has that line.

Where the Monkey years change hands

Two of the nine boundaries are worth keeping, and neither is the widest one in the set.

1992 is the only Monkey year where the start of spring and lunar new year's day fall on the same calendar date. 立春 came at 21:48 on 4 February, and 4 February was also the first day of the first lunar month. A birth on that date before 21:48 is a Monkey by the lunar calendar and a Goat by the year pillar, because the pillar turns at the start of spring and not at new year. The window is 21 hours and 48 minutes wide.

1980 runs the other way. 立春 fell at 00:09:28 on 5 February, nine and a half minutes after midnight, while lunar new year's day was 16 February. For the eleven days between, the year pillar is 庚申 and the lunar year is still 己未.

That nine-minute margin is not a fluke of one year. Twelve Gregorian years hold 4,383 days and twelve tropical years hold about 4,382.9, so each successive Monkey year starts roughly two hours nine minutes earlier in the day. 1920 fell at 10:26, 1932 at 08:29, 1944 at 06:22, then 04:11, then 02:07, until 1980 landed just past midnight. Every Monkey year after it begins on 4 February.

What to check in your own chart

The year branch is one of four pillars. A Monkey carrying 未 in the month, day or hour pillar has a relation to 2027 that the year branch alone does not show.

未 is the month that runs from 小暑 to 立秋, roughly 7 July to 7 August. As a day branch it comes round every twelve days. As an hour branch it covers 13:00 to 15:00. Any one of those is the same character as the 2027 year branch, and a chart that already holds it meets this year twice.

A Monkey with 未 nowhere in the chart has nothing for 2027 to act on. That is the ordinary case: one branch out of twelve appears in about one position out of twelve, so most charts of a given animal do not carry the year branch of the year in question.

What this page does not do

It does not say 2027 will be quiet, easy or uneventful for anyone born in a Monkey year.

The tables describe which branch pairs are named together. They say nothing about income, health, work or family, and nothing here converts into a forecast. A year with no relation to the birth branch is a year the branch system has nothing to say about. That is a different statement from a good year, and the difference matters if you are reading this in order to decide something.

The four-four-four count is arithmetic over six published lists: 六合, 冲, 刑, 破, 害 and the two groupings 三合 and 三会. If a list is wrong in a source you trust more than this one, the count moves with it. The derivation is written out section by section above so that you can rerun it and get the same twelve rows.