1988 Chinese Zodiac: Earth Dragon, Years and Compatibility

1988 is an Earth Dragon year

The year 1988 carries the Dragon, and more precisely the Earth Dragon. The sexagenary cycle — the sixty-term count that pairs one heavenly stem with one earthly branch — names it 戊辰 (Wu-chen). Wu is the fifth of the ten stems and one of the two assigned to Earth; Chen is the fifth of the twelve branches, the Dragon. That pairing is what makes it an Earth Dragon rather than simply a Dragon year: the same animal comes round every twelve years, but the stems cycle every ten, so a given stem-and-animal pair returns once in sixty — 1928, 1988, 2048.

The two conventions in use give the year different edges. Under China's national standard for the calendar the animal changes on Lunar New Year's Day, so this year runs from 17 February 1988 to 5 February 1989. Chart-reading changes the sexagenary year at Li Chun, which in 1988 falls on 4 February.

1988 is also a leap year. The Gregorian year has 366 days and 29 February is one of them. The next section gives the branch's relations. After it, the rest of this page is about what that extra day does and does not touch: the twelve dates that cut the year into months, and the one of the twelve that did not move at all.

1988 Compatibility: Six Harmony, Clash and Trine

The year gives one branch and nothing else — 辰 Chen, the Dragon. The three relations below follow from that branch alone: they hold for every birth whose year branch is 辰, 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 leap day that no solar term landed on

February 1988 has an extra day in it. The Hong Kong Observatory's calendar for that year lists 29 February as a Monday, the thirteenth day of the first lunar month. The two solar terms that fall in that February are on the 4th, Li Chun, and the 19th, Rain Water. The extra day sits between them with nothing written on it.

The extra day also belongs to one calendar only. The lunar year that opened on 17 February ran to 6 February of the following year — 355 days and twelve months, with no month appearing twice. The Observatory's table repeats a month number when the lunar year carries a leap month, and it does so in the neighbouring years: the sixth month twice in 1987, the fifth twice in 1990, the third twice in 1993. In 1988 nothing repeats.

So a leap day and a leap month are two different devices in two different calendars, and 1988 has the first while not having the second. Neither of them is read by the third count in the picture — the sexagenary one — which is what the next section is about.

A month pillar is cut by twelve terms, not by twelve moons

The second column of a BaZi chart is the month pillar, and its edge is not the first day of a lunar month. It is one of the twelve sectional solar terms. The Ming compendium Sanming Tonghui names the two groups in a single passage: Moderate Heat is the sectional term of the sixth month and Great Heat the mid-month term of the same month; White Dew is the sectional term of the eighth month and Cold Dew that of the ninth. Twelve of the twenty-four terms open a month, and the other twelve sit inside one.

The upper character of the month pillar is derived from the year stem, and the chapter on deriving it gives the rule as a song. For a Wu year the line reads: where do Wu and Gui years begin? Look to Jia over Yin. So the first month pillar of 戊辰 is 甲寅 (Jia-yin), and the twelve run 甲寅, 乙卯, 丙辰, 丁巳, 戊午, 己未, 庚申, 辛酉, 壬戌, 癸亥, 甲子, 乙丑. The month that opens on Bright and Clear, 4 April, is 丙辰 (Bing-chen) — the same branch character as the year, on a different stem.

That is why the leap day cannot reach the month pillar. A lunar month is bounded by the new moon; a month pillar is bounded by the sun. The two line up often enough to be mistaken for one another, and in 1988 they do not: its twelve lunar months never repeat, while eight of its twelve solar boundaries land a day earlier than the year before. Month Pillar in BaZi sets out the general rule for how a month branch is found.

Eight of the twelve boundaries moved; the first one did not

Line the twelve sectional terms up as the Observatory prints them in 1987 and in 1988, and eight of the twelve fall one calendar day earlier in 1988: Insects Waken on 5 March instead of 6 March, Bright and Clear on 4 April instead of 5 April, Summer Commences 5 May instead of 6 May, Corn on Ear 5 June instead of 6 June, Autumn Commences 7 August instead of 8 August, White Dew 7 September instead of 8 September, Cold Dew 8 October instead of 9 October, and Winter Commences 7 November instead of 8 November. Four fall on exactly the same date: Li Chun on 4 February, Moderate Heat on 7 July, Heavy Snow on 7 December and Moderate Cold on 6 January.

Across the Observatory's ninety-one yearly tables, from 1940 to 2030, that count sorts the years cleanly. Ask of each year how many of its twelve boundaries came a day earlier than in the year before, and the answer is never fewer than 6 and never more than 10 in the 22 leap years, and never more than 2 in the 68 common ones. A back-shift of a week says leap year; a back-shift of a day or two says not. 1988's 8 sits inside the leap-year range, as does 1984's ten.

The boundary that opens the year is the exception. Li Chun is 4 February in each of the eight years from 1983 to 1990, leap year included, and it is 4 February in 75 of the ninety-one years in the table — 12 years put it on 5 February, all of them before 1981, and four put it on 3 February. So the year pillar did not move at all around 1988. The month pillars did. Anyone born on 5 March 1988 was born after Insects Waken and sits in the second month of the year; the same date in 1987 was still a day short of it and sits in the first.

Where 1988 sits in the sixty-year cycle

The cycle is anchored at 1984, which is Jia-zi, its first term. Counting from there, 1988 is the fifth: 1984 Jia-zi, 1985 Yi-chou, 1986 Bing-yin, 1987 Ding-mao, 1988 戊辰.

Five of the sixty terms carry the Dragon, spaced twelve places apart at the fifth, seventeenth, twenty-ninth, forty-first and fifty-third places. 1988 holds the first of them.

That makes 1988 the fifth term of its cycle, and the same position returns once every sixty years: 1928, 1988, 2048.

Two start lines, thirteen days apart

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 1988 the two lines fall 13 days apart, and this year Li Chun comes first: Li Chun is 4 February and Lunar New Year's Day is 17 February. That means chart-reading changes the animal 13 days before the national standard does.

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

A birthday between 4 February and 17 February

14 calendar days in 1988 sit on or between the two lines, and 13 of them are read differently depending on which convention is in play.

The 13 days from 4 February are the contested ones. The standard still counts them inside 1987, whose animal is the Rabbit, because Lunar New Year has not arrived; chart-reading has already changed the year at Li Chun on 4 February. On 17 February the two lines meet: that day is Lunar New Year's Day itself, the first day of the Dragon year under the standard, and chart-reading has been there since Li Chun. 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.

What is not on this page

It does not say what a Dragon is like, and it does not say what 1988 means for someone born in it. The animal is a label on a year, not a description of a person, and the twelve boundaries in the third section are statements about dates, not about anyone's character.

It also gives no clock time — not for Li Chun, and not for any of the other eleven boundaries. That a term falls on a given date is settled; the moment within the day is not available from one authoritative source across the whole span involved, so the dates are given and the clock times are left out rather than filled in from a different kind of source. A birth on a boundary day is the one case this page cannot settle, and the page says so rather than guessing.

Where the 1988 dates come from

Li Chun and Lunar New Year's Day for 1988 are read from the Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table for that year, which is published one file per year. The comparison in the third section uses the Observatory's tables for 1987 and for every year from 1940 to 2030. The standard behind the first line is GB/T 33661-2017, drafted by the Purple Mountain Observatory.

The split of the twenty-four terms into the twelve that open a month and the twelve that sit inside one comes from the second chapter of the Sanming Tonghui, the section on the seasons and the solar terms. The rule that gives a Wu year its first month as Jia-yin is in the next section of the same chapter, on deriving the month pillar from the year.

How we cite sets out how sources are chosen and dated on this site.

The full table behind this page — 1901 to 2100 — is published as a free dataset: chinese zodiac year boundaries.