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Reading Room · Chinese Astrology · Concept

What is the 60-year cycle in the Chinese calendar?

The Chinese calendar names years with paired signs drawn from ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches. Stepping through both lists together gives 60 distinct pairs before the first pair returns, so a name such as Wood Dragon comes back every 60 years. The same count dated days on Shang oracle bones over 3,000 years ago.

Facts checked on against 16 sources, 16 of them museum, university, archive, library, government or primary texts.

Key facts

Every line comes from a source listed at the bottom of the page. The small numbers point to it.

StemsThere are ten heavenly stems (tiangan), running in fixed order from Jia to Gui.12
BranchesThere are twelve earthly branches (dizhi), running from Zi to Hai; each branch is matched with one of the twelve zodiac animals, beginning with Zi as the Rat.12
Cycle lengthPairing stems and branches in order gives a cycle of 60 names, from Jia-Zi to Gui-Hai, which then starts over; that equals five rounds of the 12 animals.13
Oldest useLate Shang oracle bones, which the British Library dates to about 1300 to 1050 BCE, include divinations dated by days of the 60-day cycle.45
AnimalsAnimal meanings were attached to the twelve branches by the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) at the latest; the match with today’s animals is clearly attested in Wang Chong’s Lunheng, written under the Later Han.6
Year startFor the Hong Kong Observatory, which compiles Hong Kong's calendars, the stem-branch year changes on the first day of the first Chinese month, that is, Lunar New Year rather than 1 January.1
ExampleLunar New Year fell on 10 February 2024, opening a Wood Dragon year; 2026 is a bing-wu (Fire Horse) year that began on 17 February.78
Solar termsIn 2016 UNESCO inscribed China’s 24 solar terms, which divide the Sun’s yearly path into 24 parts beginning with the Beginning of Spring, on its list of intangible cultural heritage.9

How the stems and branches pair up

Both lists advance one step at a time together: the first pair is stem 1 with branch 1, the tenth is stem 10 with branch 10, and the eleventh goes back to stem 1 but carries on to branch 11.2

The same 60 labels were used to number years, months, days and hours, and also to divide the horizon into sixty six-degree sectors and to number sets of 60 items such as temple divination poems.2

Counting days on Shang oracle bones

The British Library holds hundreds of late Shang oracle bones, mostly ox shoulder blades with some turtle shell, whose carved texts record divinations for the Shang kings and their ancestors.4

A turtle plastron excavated at Anyang, now in the Academia Sinica museum, asks about rain on a jiachen day, which the museum identifies as day 41 of the 60-day cycle, and on two later named days.5

Royal Museums Greenwich says year names on this system have been used for about 2,000 years; the Hong Kong Observatory says more than two thousand years. Neither gives a single starting date for year counting.31

Animals and the five elements

Day books (rishu), manuscripts used to choose good and bad days, date from the 4th to the 1st century BCE; one of two such manuscripts found in 1975 in Shuihudi tomb 11, a burial of about 217 BCE, carries that title.10

The Metropolitan Museum of Art says the familiar order of the twelve animals was settled by the Eastern Han dynasty (9 to 220 CE) and that, paired with ten other calendrical signs, the cycle of 60 counted years in China until the twentieth century.11

The ten stems fall into five pairs, one pair for each of the five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal and water. For example, only the stems bing and ding belong to Fire.28

Because a given element-animal pairing occurs once per cycle, the bing-wu Fire Horse year came in 1966, again in 2026, and next in 2086.8

When a stem-branch year begins

The Chinese calendar is lunisolar: months begin at the new Moon, and an extra month is added in some years to keep pace with the solar year.3

Practice differs on the changeover. The Hong Kong Observatory uses the first day of the first month, but fortune tellers and folk calendar users often switch at the solar term Spring Commences; in 2018 those fell on 16 February and 4 February.1

The solar terms are 24 equal 15-degree steps along the ecliptic, the Sun’s apparent path. Spring Commences (lichun), the changeover many practitioners use, is the point where the Sun reaches longitude 315 degrees.129

What the tradition holds

How practitioners describe it, in their terms. Described, not endorsed.

Each person is linked with the animal of their birth year. Writing for the University of Sydney, sinologist Xiaohuan Zhao describes Dragon-born people as traditionally seen as ambitious and confident, while stressing these are generalisations.7

In fortune-telling practice, some stem-branch combinations are considered favourable or unfavourable for activities, read against a person's birth year, day and hour.2

In northern China a person's own animal year (benming nian) is considered a possibly unlucky time, and some people wear red at New Year as a precaution.2

What the evidence shows

What historians, scientists and controlled tests have found.

A 2002 study in Social Science and Medicine found short-term rises in Hong Kong births in the Dragon years of 1988 and 2000, against a long decline, and concluded the rise reflects parents shifting the timing of births, with little effect on total fertility.13

A 2021 Population Studies paper using Singapore records found Dragon-year birth timing among the Chinese majority but not among non-Chinese minorities, and found the larger Dragon cohorts later earned less on average, which the authors trace to cohort size rather than selection.14

Calendar makers and scholars treat the stem-branch system as a counting scheme: the same 60 labels number days, years, book volumes and compass sectors.21

In Japan the Fire Horse superstition, which held the year unlucky for daughters, cut births sharply: 1,823,697 babies were born in 1965, 1,360,974 in the hinoe-uma year 1966 and 1,935,647 in 1967. An economic study finds the same sharp dip in the previous Fire Horse year, 1906.1516

What we worked out

Not stated outright by any one source. This is our own arithmetic or reading of the sources cited.

  • Ten and twelve first line up again after 60 steps, their lowest common multiple. Since both lists advance together, an odd-numbered stem only ever meets an odd-numbered branch, so only 60 of the 120 possible pairs occur.12
  • Royal Museums Greenwich dates the current cycle from 2 February 1984, which makes 2024 the cycle's 41st year. That matches jiachen, the same label the Academia Sinica museum gives as day 41 on a Shang plastron, and the Wood Dragon year that began in February 2024.357
  • 1966 and 2026 are exactly 60 years apart, as the cycle requires for two Fire Horse years.8
  • Japan’s 1966 births were 462,723 fewer than 1965’s, a fall of about 25 percent, and 1967 rebounded above the 1965 level, which fits parents moving births out of the Fire Horse year rather than having fewer children overall.15
  • If Spring Commences sits at 315 degrees and each term is 15 degrees, the Sun reaches the spring equinox, at 0 degrees, three terms later, so the Chinese spring begins about six weeks before the astronomical one.12

What we couldn't confirm

  • We could not open the abstract of Daniel Goodkind's 1991 Population and Development Review paper on Dragon-year births, so his findings are not cited here.
  • We did not find a fetchable museum, university or journal page stating which stem in each element pair is yang and which is yin, so that detail is left out.
  • Sources say year counting by stem and branch is about or over 2,000 years old, but we found no agreed starting date.
  • Royal Museums Greenwich notes the cycle is traditionally projected back to 2637 BCE while another count starts at 2698 BCE; we found no source that settles which convention is older.
  • Popular sites say the Shuihudi slips hold the oldest list of the twelve animals, and that it differs from today’s (no dragon); we found no fetchable museum or university page confirming the list itself, so we cite the slips only for their date.

Sources

Museums, universities, archives and primary texts first. We paraphrase; nothing is copied. We never cite Wikipedia.

  1. Hong Kong Observatory: What year is it today?. Read on · Government
  2. University of California San Diego (David K. Jordan): Heaven Stems and Earth Branches. Read on · University
  3. Royal Museums Greenwich: Lunar New Year: dates, animals and the zodiac. Read on · Museum
  4. British Library: Oracle bone collection (Or 7694/1506-2125). Read on · Library
  5. Museum of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica: Inscribed Plastron Ping 0063. Read on · Museum
  6. The University of Tokyo, Biblioplaza: Review of Zooarcheology of the 12 Animals of the Chinese Zodiac (ed. Shitara Hiromi). Read on · University
  7. The University of Sydney: Lunar New Year 2024: What does the Year of the Dragon mean?. Read on · University
  8. The University of Sydney: Lunar New Year 2026: the Year of the Horse. Read on · University
  9. UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Twenty-Four Solar Terms, knowledge in China of time and practices developed through observation of the sun’s annual motion. Read on · Government
  10. IKGF, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg: Popular Culture and Books of Fate in Early China (workshop, 2012). Read on · University
  11. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Set of twelve zodiac animals. Read on · Museum
  12. Hong Kong Observatory: 24 Solar Terms. Read on · Government
  13. Social Science & Medicine (PubMed record): The influence of the Chinese zodiac on fertility in Hong Kong SAR. Read on · Peer-reviewed journal
  14. Population Studies (PubMed record): Fortunes of Dragons: Cohort size effects on life outcomes. Read on · Peer-reviewed journal
  15. Congenital Anomalies 20(1), 1980 (J-STAGE): Ryo Kondo, An apparent rise in infant mortality rate from congenital anomalies in 1966, Hinoe-Uma year, in Japan. Read on · Peer-reviewed journal
  16. The Japanese Political Economy 35(3), 2008 (RePEc abstract): Hideo Akabayashi, Lives of the Firehorse Cohort. Read on · Peer-reviewed journal

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