Rooster Chinese Zodiac: Years, Elements and Compatibility

The short answer

The Rooster is the tenth of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals — 酉, the branch that runs from 17:00 to 19:00. Its years are 1909, 1921, 1933, 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005, 2017 and 2029. It is the only bird among the twelve. It clashes with the Rabbit, and that pair is the only clash where each side hides exactly one stem.

酉 is also one of the four branches that carry self-punishment — 辰, 午, 酉 and 亥 — and self-punishment is not a claim about harming yourself. The Chinese zodiac calculator will show whether your Rooster year sits on the stem that changes how the clash reads.

The rest of this page follows the five relations in its row, and the one classical text that builds self-punishment on this branch.

The only bird on the ring

Eleven of the twelve animals are beasts. The tenth branch, 酉, is the one that is not, and the sources that bother to say so say it in the same words. The National Museum of China, opening an exhibition of 118 rooster-themed objects in 2017, introduced the animal this way: 鸡位列十二生肖之一，是相属中唯一的禽类. A newspaper essay on the same subject counts the uniqueness twice over — 鸡 is one of the six domestic animals the ancients singled out, and it is 其中唯一的禽类; fold those six into the twelve and 鸡仍是唯一的禽鸟类动物, 由1:5而至1:11, one in five, then the one in eleven.

The ratio is the point rather than a flourish. Zhu Xi, working out where the cycle came from, is reported as saying 鸡为鸟属 — the chicken belongs to the birds — and pairing it with the red bird of the southern quadrant. And the qualities the older writers list are not the ones you would list for a beast. The Han collection of anecdotes known as the Hanshi Waizhuan gives the bird five virtues: 首戴冠者文也, the comb is culture; 足傅距者武也, the spurs are arms; 敌在前敢斗勇也, standing its ground is courage; 见食相告者仁也, calling others to food is benevolence; 鸣不失时者信也, calling at the hour and never missing it is trust. The last of the five is a property of clocks, not of animals, and it is the one that ends up in the dictionary.

Which is where the branch and the animal stop being a loose fit. The Book of Rites gives the bird a ritual name, 鸡曰翰音, and the Shuowen defines the character with a job description rather than a body: 知時畜也, the domestic animal that knows the time. What follows on this page is mostly about the branch, because the branch is where the counted material sits. But it is worth keeping the first fact in view: of the twelve, this is the one the tradition keeps calling a bird. The full 144-pair chart prints every cell of the relation table below.

The punishment with nobody to punish

There is one word in the Rooster's reputation that repays a close reading: 自刑, self-punishment, the thing people repeat about 酉 in a chart and about 鸡 years. Almost nothing in the phrase is about harming yourself. It is a bookkeeping term, and the chapter that explains it explains it by counting.

The Sanming Tonghui, in its chapter on the three punishments, first states the principle — 三刑生於二合，亦如六害生於六合之義, the punishments come out of the combinations the way the harms come out of the six combinations — and then derives the four self-punishing branches rather than listing them. Add the metal frame 巳酉丑 to the group 申酉戌 and you get 巳刑申，酉見酉自刑，丑刑戌. Run the same operation on the other two frames and you get the other two results. Then it asks its own question, 辰午酉亥何以謂之自刑？, and answers group by group: 寅申巳亥有寅巳申互相刑，內有亥無刑; 辰戌丑未有戌丑未互相刑，內有辰無刑; 子午卯酉有子卯互相刑，內有午酉無刑. And then the sentence that names the thing: 是以此四位謂之自刑。蓋無別物相加，乃曰自也 — those four are called self-punishing because there is nothing else to add, so it is called self.

That is a claim a table can be checked against, and this site's table agrees with it exactly. Of the twelve branches, eight carry a punishment against another branch — the 寅申巳亥 group punishes inside itself, 丑戌未 do the same, and 子 and 卯 are the one pair that punish each other. The four branches that carry no cross-branch punishment at all are 辰, 午, 酉 and 亥. Those are, character for character, the four the chapter names. The count that came out of the engine is eight and four, and the four are 辰午酉亥.

So 自刑 is not a fifth relation bolted onto the set. It is what the list puts in the cell of a branch that has nothing else to punish, and on this branch the compendium's own one-line reason is a property instead of a story: 酉者金之位，剛則缺 — 酉 is the position of metal, and hard things chip. It is filed next to 辰者水之墓，滔則盈 and 午者火之旺，暴則焚, and all three are the same kind of remark: the branch is at the extreme of its element, and extremes are where things break. The Ox's page reads a branch that is not one of the four.

Rooster Compatibility: What the Rooster's Row Carries

Read out by rule, the Rooster's row is short and it is completely even. Six named relations are possible and this branch has all of them in one form or another, but nothing is doubled:

• Six Harmony: Dragon
• Three Harmony: Ox, Snake
• Clash: Rabbit
• Harm: Dog
• Punishment: none
• Self-punishment: Rooster

Five branches on the other side and five entries, with no branch written down twice. That is worth putting beside the Ox's row, which names six branches and carries seven, because 未 appears once as a clash and once as a punishment. Here the five entries are five distinct branches: 辰 forms the six combination, 丑 and 巳 are the other two corners of the metal frame, 卯 is the clash, and 戌 is the harm. And the two lines that carry no name are the interesting ones — the punishment line is empty and the self-punishment line points back at the branch it is written under.

The compendium grades both of the awkward relations on this row in ways that have a direction. The six combination with 辰 is not one relation but two, and they do not match: 辰合酉福弱，酉合辰大利, the Dragon combining into the Rooster is the weak direction and the Rooster combining into the Dragon is the strong one. The harm is even more lopsided — 酉戌相害者，謂戌以死火害酉旺金，此嫉妒相害，故酉人見戌則凶，戌人見酉無災. The Dog's fire, already dying, comes down on the Rooster's metal at its peak, the chapter calls the motive envy rather than strength, and it finishes by saying which way the thing runs: the Rooster meeting the Dog is the trouble, the Dog meeting the Rooster is not.

None of that reads as a temperament. It is a table with a direction field in it, and the direction field on this branch is unusually crowded: the ally and the enemy are both graded, and on both of them this branch comes out ahead. The Rabbit's page reads the other half of the clash from the other side.

The clash where neither side has a second stem

Six of the twelve pairs are clashes — the two ends of a diameter, six positions apart. Five of them have somewhere to put the shock. 卯 and 酉 do not, and the reason is in the hidden stems.

Every branch hides one or more stems inside it, and the count is not even across the ring. 丑, 寅, 辰, 巳, 未, 申 and 戌 each hide three; 午 and 亥 hide two; and exactly three branches hide one and one only: 子, 卯 and 酉. Read the six clash pairs against that list and the shape falls out. 子午 is one against two. 巳亥 is three against two. 丑未, 寅申 and 辰戌 are three against three. Only 卯酉 is one against one.

The almanac's scoring table, which splits twenty points across a branch's stems, gives the two of them the same treatment, and it is the treatment it reserves for the pure branches. 卯：乙木 20分; 酉：辛金 20分. Twenty points, one stem, all of it. Nowhere else in the six clashes do both sides take their whole score on a single stem, and its prose draws the same conclusion the verse does — 酉中辛金獨豐隆, the 辛 metal in 酉 is alone and abundant, and 酉為辛金之臨官，故藏辛金, the branch is the officer position of 辛, which is why 辛 is what it holds.

A clash between two branches that each hold one stem has nothing in reserve. There is no third stem in either cell to absorb the contact, and there is no second stem on either side to lengthen the conversation. Whatever a clash is taken to be, this pair is the version of it with no buffer on either end, which is presumably why it is the one people quote.

The peak of the metal frame

Each of the four frames of three branches is read as a life story in miniature, and the chapter on the three harmonies says so in six characters: 生即產，旺即成，庫即收 — birth is production, peak is completion, storehouse is collection. A frame missing one of its three does not form at all, 若三字缺一則化不成局. The metal frame is 巳酉丑, and the three positions are named for what happens in them. 巳 is the birth, 酉 is the peak, and 丑 is the storehouse.

So the Rooster sits in the middle of its own frame, which is a different office from the one the Ox holds: 丑 closes the metal frame as its storehouse, and the Ox's page reads it from that end. 酉 is where the frame is finished — 旺即成, the peak is the completion — and it is the only position in the frame that the month sequence puts in the middle of autumn: 八月建酉，酉中有庚金用事七日，辛金二十三日, the eighth month is built on 酉, and inside it 庚 has seven days and 辛 has twenty-three.

The almanac's prose says the same thing in the vocabulary of official positions: 酉為辛金之臨官, 酉 is the 臨官 — the officer — of 辛 metal. That is the fourth of the twelve stages a stem passes through, and it is the plateau rather than the approach to it. The storehouse at the end of the frame keeps what was made; the peak position is where it is being made. A branch that holds nothing but 辛, at the point of the cycle where 辛 is at its strongest, is about as one-note as the table gets — and the note is the reason the compendium gives for its chipped edge.

The five forms of a Rooster year

An element form is a label built from a year's heavenly stem, and a Rooster year draws its stem from five of the ten. Over the eleven Rooster years from 1909 to 2029 they come out like this:

All five are yin stems — 乙, 丁, 己, 辛 and 癸 — and that is not a coincidence about roosters in particular. 酉 sits at an odd position in the ring, and odd positions only ever take yin stems, which is the same reason every Rooster year is a yin year. What is not automatic is the distribution: eleven years is not a multiple of five, so one form has to appear three times, and here it is the earth Rooster, in 1909, 1969 and 2029. The other four forms appear twice each, and the three earth years are spaced exactly sixty years apart.

The three-times form on this page is earth, and on the Ox's page it was water — because the two windows are anchored differently, not because either animal prefers an element. An element form is a description rather than a term of art: it is assembled by putting the year's stem in front of the animal, and nothing else goes into it. The five forms and the sixty cells they make with the twelve animals are set out on their own page.

Why the dictionary calls it the animal that knows the time

The oldest definition of the character is not about feathers or farms. The Shuowen Jiezi, in the section on short-tailed birds, gives one line: 知時畜也，从隹奚聲 — a domestic animal that knows the time. Xu Xuan's commentary, added later, stretches the point rather than softening it: 鷄者，稽也。能稽時也, the chicken is the one that can reckon the hour. A bird that reports the time is also, in the Book of Rites, given a ritual name for the purpose — 鸡曰翰音 — and the fifth of the five virtues is the same idea in moral dress: 鸣不失时者信也, calling at the hour and never missing it is what trustworthiness looks like.

The branch keeps the same office. 酉 owns the twelfth double-hour in the ring's internal counting and the second one from the end of the ordinary day: 17:00 to 19:00, and the traditional name on the lists is 日入 — sunset, 又名日落、日沉、傍晚，意为太阳落山的时候. It is the one slot in the twelve named for something that happens in the sky rather than something a person is doing.

Then the month repeats the same figure twelve months later. The months are built on the branches from 寅, which puts 酉 eighth in the sequence — 八月建酉 — so the branch holds the two hours in which the day switches off and the month in which the year begins to. The almanac's line for that month splits it 七日 to 庚 and 二十三日 to 辛, which is a month that is mostly one metal. And the calendar closes the loop in the way the earlier section describes: 酉 is the peak of the autumn frame and the eighth month is the middle of autumn, so the two are the same statement made twice.

Eleven Rooster years, and a shape in the dates

A Rooster year does not begin on one date. Two lines start it depending on who is counting: the first day of the first lunar month, which is the line the national standard uses to fix the animal of a year, and 立春, which is the line a chart uses for the month pillar. The Hong Kong Observatory's conversion tables print both, and across the eleven Rooster years from 1909 to 2029 they disagree every single time.

Not by much, and never by nothing. 立春 comes first in six of the eleven years and the first lunar day in five, and in none of the eleven do the two lines land on the same date — the same result the Ox's eleven years give, over a different set of decades. The table below prints both dates for each year and the distance between them, signed.

Three things show if the columns are read down together. The solar line sits on 4 February for the first nine years and moves to 3 February for the last two, which is the drift that a leap year puts into a date fixed by the sun rather than by a rule. The lunar line swings much further, from 22 January in 1909 to 13 February in 2029, because it is set by the new moon and the new moon does not care what date the sun is on. The narrowest year of the eleven is 1981, where the first lunar month begins on 5 February and Spring Commences falls on 4 February, one day apart; the widest is 1909, at thirteen days. And the gaps themselves do something worth a second look: −13, +4, −9, +9, −4, +13 for the first six years. That is the same three distances in the same order, reversed and with the signs flipped — 1909 against 1969, 1921 against 1957, 1933 against 1945.

The last observation is a shape in these eleven printed dates and not a rule of anything. Nothing in the calendar asks for a palindrome, the remaining five years do not continue it, and a reader who moves the window by a year will lose it. It is in the table because it is in the table. The dates are not: those come straight from the Observatory, they are what the two lines actually did, and the minutely times of the solar terms that this page does not print are not available for most of the span — the Observatory's minute-level series covers a much narrower window of years than the day-level tables do.

Where this page can be wrong

The first section leans on a phrase that is doing more work than it sounds like. That the Rooster is the only bird among the twelve is a fact about a list; it is not a claim that a bird is worth more than a beast, and the pages that repeat the point are writing about how a cycle was assembled, not about a ranking. The five virtues are reported because the sources report them, and a virtue attributed to an animal in a Han anecdote collection is a piece of literary history, not a measurement of anyone born in a 酉 year.

The self-punishment section puts a heavy weight on one chapter. 自刑 is explained here the way the Sanming Tonghui explains it — a branch with no partner to punish, entered against itself — and that reading is checkable against a table, which is why it is the one used. But 自刑 is also read elsewhere as a temperament, a tendency, or a warning, and those readings are not what this page is doing. Where the counts are given, they come from this site's own table, enumerated while the page was written; the four branches are 辰午酉亥 and the eight are the rest. If another table disagrees, the disagreement is with that table and not with the arithmetic.

The window is mine, not the calendar's. It runs from 1909 to 2029 because the Observatory's day-level text tables cover that span for these years, and the counts inside it — three earth Roosters, two of everything else, six years with the solar line first — are properties of these eleven years and not of Rooster years in general. Move the window and every one of those numbers can change, which the date-pattern paragraph says in advance. Where a classical chapter has been quoted, the chapter is linked and can be read whole, including the passages this page did not use.