Pig Chinese Zodiac: Years, Elements and Compatibility

The short answer

The Pig is the twelfth and last of the Chinese zodiac animals — 亥, the branch that runs from 21:00 to 23:00. Its years are 1911, 1923, 1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019 and 2031. It is the branch the sixty-year cycle ends on: 癸亥 is a Pig year, and 1923 and 1983 are both 癸亥, each followed by an 甲子.

亥 hides exactly two stems and hides them both yang — 壬 and 甲 — and 甲 is the first of the ten. Of the twelve branches only 午 also hides exactly two, and 午's pair is both yin. So the last branch of the cycle holds the first stem.

Your birth date tells you which of the eleven Pig years is yours and which of the five forms it took.

The rest of this page is about that hidden pair, the two ways of reading it, and the eleven year-edges.

The last branch, and the first stem it holds

The twelve branches end at 亥, and the dictionary entry for the character says so in four words: 地支的末一位，属猪 — the last of the twelve, and the sign of the pig. The Sanming Tonghui, writing the pairings out in one line, ends the same way (…亥屬豬). The same chapter then sorts the twelve by parity and by feet: 奇者鼠、虎、龍、馬、猴、犬，一則屬陽，六獸之足皆單；偶者牛、兔、蛇、羊、雞、豬，二則屬陰，六獸之足皆雙 — the pig is filed with the even six, the ones whose feet come in pairs.

What makes the branch worth reading on its own is what sits inside it. The hidden-stem verse gives 亥 two stems and no more: 亥中壬水甲木存 — water 壬 and wood 甲. Count the whole table and only two branches hide exactly two stems: 午, with 丁 and 己, and 亥. The engine behind this site reads the same verse and reproduces the same counts, branch by branch: 1, 3, 3, 1, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 1, 3, 2.

Now look at which stems those are. 甲 is the first of the ten stems, and in the whole hidden-stem table it appears in exactly two branches — 寅, which opens the verse by keeping it as the leading stem (寅藏甲木和丙戊), and 亥 (亥中壬水甲木存). So the last branch of the twelve is the only place on the table where the first stem of the ten is carried below the leading position.

Pig Compatibility: What the Pig's Row Carries

• Six Harmony: Tiger
• Three Harmony: Rabbit, Goat
• Clash: Snake
• Harm: Monkey
• Punishment: none
• Self-punishment: Pig

Five branches and five entries, with no branch written down twice. The harm is the one line the compendium writes without exempting either side: 申亥相害者，謂名恃臨官，競嫉才能，爭進相害。故申見亥，亥見申均為害 — 申 into 亥 and 亥 into 申 both count. Not every pair in that chapter is symmetric; the next line over gives the Rooster's harm an explicit exemption in one direction (see the Rooster's page for that one).

The combination is graded in both directions as well. Quoting the Tianyuan Bianhuashu, the chapter reads the pair from each end and gets two different readings, 寅合亥福清 and 亥合寅福慢, and it explains the pairing by counting rather than by animal: 寅為三陽，亥是六陰，三六成九數.

Two stems under one reading, three under the other

The verse is not the only thing the tradition says about what a branch holds, and this is one of the places where the two accounts visibly disagree. The almanac page that carries the verse also scores every branch out of twenty points, and it splits 亥 as 壬水 15分 and 甲木 5分. Only one other branch divides that way: 午, at 丁火 15分 and 己土 5分.

The Sanming Tonghui's month-by-month chapter gives the branch three tenants instead of two: 十月建亥，亥中有戊土五日，甲木長生五日，壬水用事二十日 — five days of 戊 earth, five days in which 甲 wood is at its birth, and twenty of 壬 water.

The two accounts are answering different questions — what a branch holds as a whole, against who is on duty on which day of its month — and the rest of the table behaves the same way. What they agree on is polarity. The almanac files 寅申巳亥 together as 四驛馬位 and notes of them, 藏幹皆陽. Of those four, 寅, 巳 and 申 hide three stems each; 亥 hides two. Under the verse's reading, 亥 is the only branch in the twelve whose two stems are both yang.

That same page also gives the branch its two jobs in the ten-stem cycle in one clause: 亥為甲之長生，壬之臨官 — 甲 is born here, and 壬 comes into office here.

The wood frame starts on a water branch

The three-harmony frames run on a rule the compendium states in six characters: 生即產，旺即成，庫即收 — birth produces, the peak completes, the storehouse collects. 亥卯未 is the wood frame, and it reads in that order: 亥 opens it, 卯 is its peak, 未 is its storehouse.

The opening slot is the odd one. Water is what generates wood, and the branch that opens the wood frame is a water branch — so the three members of the frame come from three different elements. Two of those three slots already have pages here: 兔 is the middle of this frame, and 羊 is its storehouse.

A frame is also all-or-nothing. The same chapter refuses to read a partial one: 若三字缺一則化不成局，不可以三合化局論 — if one of the three characters is missing, no frame forms at all.

The character that was drawn like a pig

The entry for 亥 records how close the character once sat to 豕, the word for pig. The oracle-bone forms were written alike enough that 豕与亥相似 earned a line in the Lüshi Chunqiu, and the set phrase 鲁鱼亥豕 still names that kind of copying error. The Heng Lun states the identity flatly (亥，豕也), and the Shuowen's ancient form is the pig character outright: 𢁓，古文亥爲豕，與豕同.

The pig is also the animal that ended up inside the character for home. The Capital Museum's own note for the exhibition reads the character by its shape — 从字形上看，房屋里有一头猪，表示豢养猪畜的稳定居所，是人类经历迁徙走向定居，生活安宁、富足的见证 — there is a pig under the roof, and that marks pigs kept in a fixed pen: the moment a people who had been on the move settled down, and their houses became quiet and sufficient places.

And the record for the animal itself runs further back than for any of the other eleven. As the Renmin Zhengxie Wang essay on pig artefacts reports, 最早在距今9000年之前的贾湖遗址中，就曾出现过很多猪骨陪葬 — the Jiahu site, before nine thousand years ago, has produced pig bones in burials, which is the earliest evidence in China for keeping pigs.

Nine to eleven at night, and the tenth month

亥 owns the last double-hour of the day: 21:00 to 23:00. The Guangdong health commission's hour table reads it 亥时：人定，又名定昏等（21时至23时）— 人定, the hour the household has settled — and 子时 then restarts the count at 23:00.

Its month is not last, though. The month list built on the branches opens at 正月建寅; when it reaches the pig's branch the compendium writes 十月建亥，and the dictionary agrees, 用以纪月，农历十月为亥. So 亥 is the twelfth branch, the last double-hour of the day, and the tenth month — three counts that do not agree with one another.

That mismatch is not the pig's own. Every branch sits two places out of step with the month it governs, because the month list starts at 寅 rather than at 子. What is worth noticing is narrower: the animal cycle and the hour cycle both put the pig last, and the month cycle does not.

Five forms of a Pig year

Every animal year carries one of the five elements, and the eleven Pig years between 1911 and 2031 divide unevenly:

Metal takes three years rather than two, and those three are exactly sixty years apart. The reason runs through the whole cycle: the ten stems and the twelve branches only meet in pairings of the same parity, and 亥 is an even branch, so a Pig year can fall on one of the five yin stems only — 乙, 丁, 己, 辛 or 癸. 辛 is the metal one, and it comes round every sixty years.

The year that closes the sixty

The sexagenary cycle is sixty pairs long, and it ends where it does not begin: the first pair is 甲子 and the sixtieth is 癸亥, a Pig year. Two of the eleven years on this page are 癸亥 — 1923 and 1983 — and in both of them the following year is 甲子.

The Shuowen closes its entry on the character with the same figure: 亥而生子，復從一起 — at 亥 it gives birth to 子, and the count begins again from one. The commentary spells out why that position and not another: 十月於卦爲坤，微陽從地中起接盛陰, the small yang rising out of the earth to meet the full yin, which the Book of Changes puts as 龍戰於野.

The animal has been attached to the branch along the same line. The Capital Museum's own exhibition text states it plainly: 亥猪作为时间和生命循环周期的界点，是周期循环的终点，也是新周期的起点 — the pig branch is the threshold between one cycle of time and the next, the end of the round and the start of the new one. That on its own does not settle why the animals are ordered as they are. It does say that the branch the pig sits on is the one a count of sixty comes back through.

Eleven Pig years, and two start lines

A Pig year has two beginnings. The standard that fixes the animal of a year starts it at the first day of the first lunar month; a chart runs its month pillars from 立春. The Hong Kong Observatory prints both in one table, and these are its dates for the eleven Pig years from 1911 to 2031:

The two lines never land on the same date in this window. 立春 comes first in five of the eleven years and the first lunar day in six, and the distance is wide: it runs from one day in 1935 to fourteen days in 2007.

The solar line is unusually steady here, and unusually early. 立春 falls on 4 February for the last eight years and on 5 February for the first three; it never once moves to the 3rd. The lunar line travels much further, from 22 January in 1947 to 18 February in 2007 — twenty-seven days of range, set by the new moon and not by the sun. One of the eleven, 1995, also carries a leap eighth month: that year's page works through what the leap month does and does not change.

Where this page can be wrong

The two accounts of what 亥 holds are printed side by side above rather than merged, because they answer different questions and neither one is a correction of the other. The counts of stems, branches and relations come from the engine that runs this site and from the verses the sources print, and both are printed so they can be checked against each other. The classical passages are quoted from online transcriptions rather than from a collated edition, so a character here and there may differ from a printed text. The pairing of an animal with a branch names a position in a calendar; it is not a description of a person, and nothing on this page is a claim about what will happen in a Pig year.