Dog Chinese Zodiac Sign

The Dog holds Xu, the eleventh branch, the evening hours from seven to nine and the ninth solar month, which opens at Cold Dew. What makes Xu unusual is what is inside it. Its surface element is Earth, but the branch conceals three stems — Wu on top, Xin in the middle and Ding in the residual position — so underneath dry late-autumn ground there is buried Metal and a banked Fire. Xu is the storehouse that closes the fire trine, and the tradition reads the whole sign out of that arrangement: nothing much showing, a hard edge some way down, and heat that is kept rather than spent.

The old texts give Xu a name of its own. Chen is the Heavenly Net and Xu is the Earth Net, Di Wang — the two branches that catch and hold, sitting directly opposite each other on the cycle. Xu also occupies the north-west with Qian and Hai, the sector the compass schools call the Heaven Gate. A branch that is simultaneously a net and a gateway is a fair description of what readings expect from this sign: it decides what gets through. The animal fits the position rather than creating it, and the month reinforces it — Cold Dew to Start of Winter is the part of the agricultural year when nothing more is grown and everything gathered has to be kept.

The buried Xin is where the descriptions start. Metal inside Earth is read as a line that does not move: this is the sign the texts call impossible to buy, pleasant enough on the surface and completely immovable about the one thing it has decided. Fairness follows, and it takes a specific form — not abstract justice but bookkeeping, a running account of who did what and who owes whom, applied to itself as strictly as to anyone else. The third strength belongs to the Earth Net: Xu is credited with knowing where a boundary should go and then holding it, which is why the sign appears in descriptions of editors, auditors, stewards and anyone whose job is to decide what does not pass. The fourth is the least glamorous and the most used — maintenance. Late autumn is the season of keeping what exists in working order, and the Dog is the sign the almanac associates with repair, upkeep and the unnoticed work that stops things falling over.

The banked Ding is the first caution. A fire kept in a vault is not a temper that flares; it is a temper that accrues, and the classical warning is about the day the vault opens — grievances raised in one settlement rather than one at a time, months after the point they were about. The texts recommend the boring remedy: say the small thing when it is small. The second caution is what the bookkeeping becomes. A verdict recorded and never reopened turns into a quietly shrinking circle, and readings describe this as the sign's main route to loneliness rather than any failure of warmth. The third is the net catching its keeper: boundaries drawn faster than they are reviewed, until the rule that protected something is the rule preventing it. Xu also sits in the Chou–Xu–Wei punishment of power, traditionally read as friction between allies who each hold a position of responsibility and each believe they were the reasonable one.

The animal repeats every twelve years but the stem above it repeats every ten, so each sign comes in five element variants and the same combination only returns after sixty years. Each variant below lists the Dog years it covers between 1900 and 2043.

Years in this table are calendar years. The zodiac year actually turns at Lichun (立春), around 4 February, not on 1 January and not on Chinese New Year — so anyone born in January or early February of a listed year may belong to the previous sign. Check a specific date and time with the zodiac calculator. Check a birth date against Lichun.

Xu's Six Harmony partner is the Rabbit, and the two combine into Fire — the branch that releases what Xu is storing, which is why the tradition reads this pair as the one that gets the Dog to spend its warmth instead of banking it. The Three Harmony frame is the fire trine with the Tiger and the Horse, an alliance of nerve, drive and principle in which the Dog is the member who asks whether the plan is defensible. Opposite sits the Dragon: the Earth Net against the Heavenly Net, a clash between the only two branches the tradition names as traps, and the tables score it accordingly. The Rooster stands in harm with Xu — buried Metal meeting exposed Metal — and the Goat carries both destruction and the Chou–Xu–Wei punishment, which lands it on exactly the same score as the clash: two different routes to the same low number.

Xu's fixed element is Earth, so the traditional colours are yellow and brown, the numbers five and ten, and the direction the centre in the five-element scheme, with West-northwest as the branch's own compass sector. Fire produces Earth, so red and purple, two and seven, and the South make up the classical supporting set. These are cultural correspondences drawn from the element tables, nothing more.

This page describes the sign itself, which does not change from year to year. For what the 2027 Fire Goat year does to the Dog — the Tai Sui relationship, the five-element reading and a month-by-month table — see the year page. Dog in 2027.

Your animal is one of the eight characters in a birth chart, and the coarsest of them. The free four-pillars chart works out the other seven from your birth date, time and place.