Monkey Chinese Zodiac: Years, Elements and Compatibility

The short answer

The Monkey is the ninth of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals — 申, the branch that runs from 15:00 to 17:00. Its years are 1920, 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004, 2016, 2028 and 2040. It clashes with the Tiger, combines with the Snake, and punishes both — the Tiger and the Snake are also the two members of its punishment set.

Of the five element forms a Monkey year can take, only metal has a name in general use. 庚 is 申's principal hidden stem and 申 is the position 庚 holds, so 庚申 is the only Monkey year whose stem sits on its own branch's ground: 1980 and 2040.

Your birth date will place you in one of the five forms, including the four that no one searches for by name.

The rest of this page is about why the arithmetic lands that way, and what the Ming chapter says about the pairings.

Five forms, and only one of them has a name

Monkey years arrive every twelve years, and the element a year carries comes from its heavenly stem. A stem cycle is ten and a branch cycle is twelve, so any one animal meets five stems before the pairing repeats — which is why there is not one Monkey year but five, and five English names for them: wood, fire, earth, metal and water monkey.

Only two of those five are names anybody uses. This site's own survey of search suggestions, taken from two seed terms, produced sixty element-and-animal combinations in theory and twenty-one that anyone had actually typed; the Monkey accounts for two of the twenty-one, and they are metal and water. The 60-cell table sets out what that gap means. The other three forms are not rare searches and not misspellings — they are combinations that can be computed and that nobody, in the records this site has, asked for.

• Metal Monkey: 1920, 1980, 2040 — in the record
• Water Monkey: 1932, 1992 — in the record
• Wood Monkey: 1944, 2004 — computed, no record
• Fire Monkey: 1956, 2016 — computed, no record
• Earth Monkey: 1968, 2028 — computed, no record

So the metal monkey is the one of the five that has a name in use, and the rest of this page is about why the metal in particular is the one the tradition bothered to name. The answer is not that metal suits the Monkey better than the other four. It is arithmetic: 庚, the stem that makes a year a metal year, is 申's own stem, and the position 庚 occupies in the ring is 申 itself.

Why the metal is the monkey's own metal

Every branch carries a set of heavenly stems underneath it, and 申 carries three: 庚, 壬 and 戊. The reference material agrees on which of the three dominates. The almanac page that lists the hidden stems gives 申 as holding 庚 metal as its principal stem, with 壬 water and 戊 earth beneath it; the Ming compendium's chapter on the month's ruling element gives the seventh month as twenty days of 庚, five days of 壬 and five days of earth — the same three, in the same order, with 庚 in the majority. In the vocabulary these sources use, 申 is a metal branch.

The position 庚 occupies is written down twice as well. The compendium's chapter on the ten stems and their emoluments — 祿, the post a stem holds when it is at full strength — gives the whole list in one line: 甲祿寅, 乙祿卯, 庚祿申, 辛祿酉, 壬祿亥, 癸祿子, 丙祿巳, 丁祿午. The almanac page states the same fact from the other side when it explains the four branches of the growth cycle: 申 is where 壬 is born, where 庚 takes office, and where 戊 falls ill.

Put those two facts together and the metal monkey stops being a preference. 庚 is the only one of the five stems a Monkey year can carry that is also 申's own principal stem, and because 庚 is at its office in 申, 庚申 is the only Monkey year in which the year's stem is sitting on its own ground. It is not one option out of an open set: 申 is one of the six yang branches, the pairing rule gives a yang branch only yang stems, and those five — 甲, 丙, 戊, 庚 and 壬 — include exactly one that belongs to this branch.

One property of the branch is worth stating here rather than later, because a later section leans on it. The almanac page groups the twelve branches into four sets and notes that the four it calls the growth positions — 寅, 申, 巳 and 亥 — hold only yang stems. The stems under 申 are all yang for the same reason, and that is what fixes the list of stems a Monkey year can carry at all.

The names the Ming chapter gives the 庚 years in 申

The emolument chapter does something with 庚 that is unusual enough to be worth a section of its own. Having fixed 庚's post at 申, it works through the ways a 申 year can carry a 庚 frame and gives each one a name of its own, as though they were different posts rather than the same post occupied by the same stem.

• 壬申 (Water Monkey): Defeat Emolument — 1932, 1992
• 丙申 (Fire Monkey): Defeat Emolument — 1956, 2016
• 戊申 (Earth Monkey): Hidden Horse Emolument — 1968, 2028
• 庚申 (Metal Monkey): Long Life Emolument — 1920, 1980, 2040

Two of the four are named for defeat, one for a horse that will not move, and only the last for long life; the chapter closes its entry on that one with a two-character verdict. This page reports the names and does not adopt the verdict — what is interesting here is not that a Ming author thought one combination favourable, but that the tradition had separate names for 庚申 and 壬申 at all. The same chapter also says where an emolument cannot sit: the four storehouse branches, 辰, 戌, 丑 and 未, carry none, because two of them are frontier ground and the other two are the gate the nobleman passes through. So eight branches carry an emolument and four carry none, and 申 is one of the eight. One of the five 申 years is missing from the chapter's list under this heading: 甲申 is named elsewhere in the same chapter, under a different rule.

The hour from three to five, and the seventh month

The Monkey holds the fifteenth and sixteenth hours of the traditional day. 申时 runs from 15:00 to 17:00, and its classical name is 晡时, the late-afternoon meal, which the Huainanzi describes in a line the sources still quote for it: the sun reaches the Valley of Sorrow, and this is called the afternoon. The reading of why the monkey owns those two hours is behavioural, and China's science popularisation platform, which is run by the China Association for Science and Technology, gives it in one sentence: it is said that the monkey's call is at its clearest in that window, and that is why the branch is 申.

The animal's other seat is the month, and the months are numbered from the Tiger. The first month is 寅 and the seventh is 申, which is why the compendium chapter that parcels out 申's hidden stems opens its entry with 七月建申 — the seventh month is built on 申. That month is the one containing the beginning of autumn, and its twenty ruling days belong to 庚, which is the same sentence as the one in section two read from the calendar's side: the month and the branch share one master stem.

The hour and the month are both positions past the middle of their cycles rather than at the start of them, and both are derived from the ring rather than felt. 申 is the ninth of the twelve double-hours, and the seventh of the twelve months; neither number is a statement about a person, and this page does not turn either into one. The Tiger page reads the branch that opens the year instead, which is the parent of the month order this section has just used.

What the chapter on the animals says, and where it gives up

The compendium's chapter on the animals is where the pairing itself is written down: 申屬猴 — the Monkey is the animal of the branch 申. The same chapter sorts the twelve by their feet, putting the Rat, Tiger, Dragon, Horse, Monkey and Dog among the odd-numbered ones and the other six among the even, so that the Monkey is a yang animal in the classical scheme and the reason given for it is anatomical rather than calendrical.

Then the chapter does something a modern writer would not. It tests its own scheme and reports the failures. If fire beats metal, why does the snake not eat the monkey? If earth beats water, why do the goat and the ox not kill the pig? And it answers itself in the same breath — the monkey is afraid of the rat, which water should not beat, and afraid of the dog, whose earth should not beat metal — before conceding the whole point in one sentence: the animals of the twelve branches do not line up with the five-element relations at all. What does line them up, it says, is teeth and sinew: creatures that have blood in them master one another by the sharpness of their teeth and the strength of their limbs.

That concession is worth keeping on a page like this one. The pairing of an animal to a branch is a convention old enough that the people writing about it in the Ming dynasty inherited it as a given; one of them ran the obvious tests, found the element story wanting, and said so in print instead of patching it. The Rat page quotes the other half of the same passage — the line in which the monkey fears the rat — when it explains why the rat leads the sequence at all.

Monkey Compatibility: Five of the Six Slots, Two Also Punishments

Every branch takes six positions in the classical relationship table behind the 144-pair chart, one for each rule that can name it. For the Monkey, five of them are written out in five chapters of one Ming compendium:

• Six Harmony (六合): Snake
• Three Harmony (三合): Rat, Dragon
• Clash (六冲): Tiger
• Harm (六害): Pig
• Punishment (三刑): Tiger, Snake

Read together, each rule turns out to be arithmetic on the same ring, and the compendium supplies the numbers for all of it in a single line: 七則沖，十則刑，六則合 — seven for the clash, ten for the punishment, six for the combination. The combinations are pairs, and the chapter on them works each pair out as a sum, 巳 and 申 coming to nine. The Three Harmony is a set of three that does not form if a member is missing. The punishment sets are derived rather than listed: the chapter takes each Three Harmony frame and shifts it three positions along the ring — add the frame three places on from the water frame 申子辰 and 申 lands on 寅, which is where 申刑寅 comes from.

The Monkey's sixth position is the one it does not have. Four branches punish themselves, and the compendium derives them as what is left over when each group of four is stripped of its punishing pairs: among 寅, 申, 巳 and 亥, three punish one another and 亥 is the one left without a partner. 申 is not among the four. What remains is a property this page has not seen stated anywhere and can be recomputed from the ring: of the Monkey's four named partners, two — the Tiger and the Snake — are also members of its punishment set, and those two are exactly the branch it clashes with and the branch it combines with. Enumerating all twelve branches the same way, 申 is the only branch for which that is true. The Snake page reads the same triangle from the other end, where one animal is both the closest ally and a punishment partner; the Rat page is one of the Monkey's Three Harmony set. Neither of them states this closure, and this page draws no conclusion from it about any person.

Eleven Monkey years, and the metal at both ends

Monkey years arrive every twelve years. Between 1920 and 2040 there are eleven of them.

Five forms appear, and they are not evenly spread: the metal monkey comes round three times — 1920, 1980, 2040 — while each of the other four appears twice. That shape is a choice this page made rather than a fact about monkeys. Every form recurs every sixty years, and this window was picked so that it opens and closes on a 庚申 year, which puts the metal monkey at both ends and gives the other four two turns each inside it.

Two mechanisms produce the table. The first is arithmetic: twelve years pass between one Monkey and the next and a stem cycle is ten, so each step down the table advances the stem by two, and the five forms appear in the generating order of the five elements before the sequence returns to the top. The second is the property from section two — because 申 holds only yang stems, a Monkey year can carry only the five yang stems, and those five are exactly the forms in the table. The consequence is the sentence this page opened with, now with years attached: every metal monkey is 庚申, and 1980, the one people writing about the metal monkey usually mean, is the middle of the three.

A Monkey year has two start lines

Where a Monkey year begins is two questions rather than one, and China's calendar standard settles the more official of them. GB/T 33661-2017, drafted by the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and in force since September 2017, fixes how the lunar year is named and puts the animal's year at the first lunar month: its rule is that the span from the first day of the first month to the last day of the twelfth is the animal's year. On the standard's reading, the animal changes on Lunar New Year's Day.

Chart reading draws the line somewhere else — at Li Chun, the solar term that opens spring, which falls on 3, 4 or 5 February. Two Monkey years show how far apart the two lines can sit, and both come from the Hong Kong Observatory's published conversion tables. In 1980 the observatory puts Spring Commences on 5 February and the first lunar month on 16 February: eleven days apart, so that a birth inside that gap is a Monkey under one reading and a Goat under the other. In 2040 the same two lines fall on 4 February and 12 February: eight days apart.

A third Monkey year closes the gap entirely. In 1992 the observatory's table puts Spring Commences and the first lunar month on the same day, 4 February, so there is no window to be born into. That case has a page of its own: 1992 in the Chinese zodiac.

Neither line is a rival answer to the other — one is the state's rule for naming a year, the other is the convention this site's charts use, and both are fixed by the same underlying astronomy. One thing is easier here than it was for the Rat: the observatory's tables render 申 as Monkey in English, heading 1980 and 2040 alike as Geng-shen, year of the Monkey, which is the same word this page has been using throughout. How this site handles sources sets out the rest.

Where this page can be wrong

Four places, stated plainly.

The names come first, because this page leans on them. Defeat emolument, hidden horse, long life emolument — none of those is a description of anything; they are one Ming author's labels for the pairings of a stem with a branch, and this page reports them without adopting them. The chapter tags one of the four favourably and two of them badly, and those tags are judgments about readings of a chart rather than facts about a year, so this page does not repeat them as its own.

The emolument arithmetic comes second. The rule this page uses — a yang stem's post sits three positions on from its element's birth position in the ring — reproduces all ten entries of the chapter's own list, including the two stems that share a post. But the rule is this page's summary and not the source; the chapter is the source, and the chapter's list is what the rule is checked against. Where a later source disagrees, the chapter wins.

The hidden stems come third, and this is the one place where 申 is easier than the Rat. The traditions that part company elsewhere agree here: the almanac page, the compendium's chapter on the month's ruling element, and this site's own engine all give 申 the same three stems in the same order, with 庚 principal. Where sources do differ, for branches this page is not about, they differ over weight rather than over membership. If a chart you have seen puts different numbers under 申, that is what it is.

The dates come last. This site computes Li Chun with a short astronomical series accurate to minutes rather than seconds, and the two examples above were chosen for being wide: eleven days in 1980, eight in 2040. A birthday in the middle of February is unaffected by which line is read; a birthday at either end of the window is decided by it. And the span in section seven, 1920 to 2040, is a window this page chose, which is why the metal monkey appears three times in its table and would appear twice in a window chosen differently.