Snake Chinese Zodiac: Years, Elements and Compatibility

The short answer

The Snake is the sixth of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals — 巳, the branch that runs from 09:00 to 11:00. Its years are 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013, 2025, 2037 and 2049. The current one, 2025, is a Wood Snake. It combines with the Monkey — and also punishes the Monkey, which makes its closest ally one of the two branches it is said to punish.

The Snake's year is also where the two new-year lines most often disagree: in 2025 the national standard changes the animal on 29 January while a chart changes it on 3 February, so a birth in that gap is a Snake under one and a Dragon under the other. A chart from your birth date and hour is the only way to be sure which side you are on.

The rest of this page is about that doubling-up, and about the year that carries two Spring Commences.

The 1989 Earth Snake year — where it sits in the sixty — has its own page.

Snake Compatibility: The One Pair That Is Both an Alliance and a Punishment

Every branch in the ring of twelve holds six positions in the classical relationship table behind the 144-pair chart. Two of those positions are defined by pairs, and for the Snake the two land on the same animal: the Monkey.

巳 and 申 form one of the six combinations, 六合 — the relation the table treats as most binding, the same one that pairs the Rat with the Ox and the Tiger with the Pig. They are also two members of a three-part punishment set, 三刑, together with the Tiger: 寅, 巳 and 申 punish one another. So the Snake's closest ally in the table is also one of the two branches it punishes.

This is not a figure of speech. Of the six combinations, this is the only one of the six whose two branches also share a punishment group; the other five sit on branches with no punishment between them. The check is arithmetic rather than interpretive: the combinations are fixed pairs, the punishments are fixed sets, and the overlap can be recomputed from the ring of twelve without knowing anything about what a Snake is supposed to be like.

The slot between nine and eleven in the morning

Before clocks, the day was divided into twelve double-hours, each named by a branch, and the Snake holds the sixth: 巳, from 09:00 to 11:00. It sits between the Dragon's 07:00 to 09:00 and the Horse's 11:00 to 13:00.

The naming is not arbitrary, and the explanation most often given is behavioural: the snake is said to keep to the grass during this stretch, which is where the branch takes its animal from. China's flagship science popularisation platform, run by the China Association for Science and Technology, and a People's Daily feature give the same reason for the same two hours.

Read on the ring, this is the stretch where the sun has climbed but has not yet reached the middle. The Horse takes 11:00 to 13:00, the middle of the day; the Snake takes the two hours leading into it; the Tiger takes the two that lead out of the night. Three branches, three positions relative to noon — and none of them is a statement about a person.

Why folk custom calls it the little dragon

The Snake's popular name is 小龙, the little dragon. It was not invented to be reassuring: the dragon's body is drawn from the snake's, and the classical comparison runs in both directions. The Lunheng has it that a painted dragon gets a horse's head and a snake's tail; Wen Yiduo, in his study of Fuxi, states it flatly — the dragon is a great snake, the snake is a little dragon.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences read it the same way in a 2025 interview: the snake ranks sixth, is commonly called the little dragon, and the two are treated as the same family, which is part of why the nickname lightens an animal that also appears among the five poisons.

For this page the nickname is a signpost rather than a fact about people. The Dragon page takes the one branch in the twelve with no animal behind it; the Snake is the branch that folk custom hands the dragon's body back to. Two pages, one image, and neither claims the animal says anything about the person born under it.

Eleven Snake years, five element forms

Snake years arrive every twelve years. Between 1929 and 2049 there are eleven of them, and they do not all carry the same element: the element comes from the year's heavenly stem, which advances by ten while the branch advances by twelve, so an animal meets five stems before the pairing repeats.

Five forms appear across that span, and they are not evenly spread: the Earth Snake comes round three times — 1929, 1989, 2049 — while each of the other four forms appears twice. Read down the form column and the order never varies: Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, Fire, then back to Earth.

Read across instead, and the current Snake year is 2025, a Wood Snake; the next is 2037. Whichever row of that table is yours, the row tells you two things and only two: which stem and branch the year carries, and what element the stem is.

The other five slots in the table

Each branch holds six positions, one for every rule that can name it. The Snake's are these:

• Six Harmony (六合): Monkey
• Three Harmony (三合): Ox, Rooster
• Clash (六冲): Pig
• Harm (六害): Tiger
• Punishment (三刑): Tiger, Monkey

Three Harmony is a set rather than a pair, and the Snake's is Ox, Snake and Rooster — the three that leave the same remainder when divided by four. The clash is the branch six positions away, which for the Snake is the Pig; the harm is the one sitting beside it, the Tiger.

Two entries on that list land on the same animal twice over. The Monkey is both the Six Harmony partner and one of the two punishments; the Tiger is both the harm and the other punishment. The Tiger page reads the same table from its own side, and its punishment group is the same three branches.

One work, two chapters, opposite readings

The tension between the two readings is not modern, and it is not an error in the table. The Ming-dynasty compendium Sanming Tonghui defines the Snake's relation to the Monkey twice, in two adjacent chapters of the same volume: the chapter on the six combinations gives 巳 as combining with 申, with the arithmetic written out; the chapter on the three punishments gives 巳 as punishing 申.

The same work even names the mechanism, in a line worth keeping: the three punishments are born from the two combinations. That is the line the first section of this page rests on. Alliance and punishment are not rival claims about one pair of branches; they are two rows of a single table, read under different rules.

This site does not rank the two. It treats both as positions and recomputes them: the combinations are the pairs that sum to the same figure on the ring, and the punishment sets are fixed triples. Where a reader wants one answer, the honest reply is that the table gives two — and a reading that drops one of them is reading half a table.

A Snake year has two start lines, and sometimes two springs

A Snake year does not begin on 1 January, and which 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: under the standard the animal changes on Lunar New Year's Day. Chart-reading changes the sexagenary year at Li Chun, the solar term that opens spring, which falls on 3, 4 or 5 February.

In 2025 the two lines fall five days apart. Lunar New Year's Day is 29 January and Li Chun is 3 February, so the standard changes the animal five days before chart-reading does: a birth on 29, 30 or 31 January, or on 1 or 2 February, is a Snake under the standard and still a Dragon under the reckoning this site uses. The Hong Kong Observatory's conversion table for 2025 names the year Yi-si, marks Spring Commences on 3 February, and puts the first lunar month on 29 January.

This particular Snake year carries a second oddity. A leap lunar year is longer than a solar one, so the year Yi-si runs from 29 January 2025 to 16 February 2026 and holds two Spring Commences — one on 3 February 2025, one on 4 February 2026. The Tianjin Astronomical Society puts that at 37 of the century's 100 years, with just as many years carrying none at all. A year with two Li Chun is not rare, and not lucky by construction.

What the double spring does not do is move anyone's animal. The branch advances once for the whole lunar year, and two Li Chun are a consequence of how the lunar and solar years are reconciled, not a second boundary. That a year carries two of them says nothing about the person born in it.

Where this page can be wrong

Three places, stated plainly rather than buried.

The pairing table comes first. This page's central claim — that the Snake's Six Harmony partner is also one of its two punishments — rests on the classical table, and classical sources do not agree on every cell. What can be said is that the overlap is not a reading invented here: the same Ming compendium writes both relations, in adjacent chapters. Where sources conflict this page follows the algebra rather than a ranking of authorities, because the rules are positional and every cell can be recomputed.

The boundary dates come second. This site computes Li Chun with a short astronomical series accurate to minutes rather than seconds, and 2025 is a boundary year in the sharpest sense: the two lines sit five days apart, so for a birth inside that window the answer is decided entirely by which line you read. For a birthday in mid-February it changes nothing.

The folk material comes third. The name 小龙 and the usual explanation for the Snake's double-hour come from custom and from scholarship about custom, not from the calendar. They are worth knowing, and they carry no claim about what a person born in the Snake's year or hour is like. How this site handles sources sets out the rest.