Rooster Chinese Zodiac Sign

The Rooster holds You, the tenth branch, the hours from five to seven in the evening and the eighth solar month, which opens at White Dew and contains the autumn equinox. Metal is its fixed element, and You is the purest metal position in the system — the only one of the two metal branches with a single hidden stem, Xin, refined metal rather than ore. Readings of the sign take that literally: nothing mixed in, nothing softened, a temperament with the edges left on.

The animal supplies the other half. A rooster announces the hour whether or not the household wants to hear it, and it does so on time, every time; before clocks it was the instrument that organised the working day. Descriptions of You accordingly combine punctuality, dependability and a certain indifference to whether the announcement is welcome. The branch also sits exactly at West on the compass and in the eighth month, the season of harvest and of sorting what is worth keeping.

Exactness is the signature. The Rooster is credited with noticing the discrepancy everyone else has scrolled past, with keeping records that survive scrutiny, and with a standard of finish that does not drop when nobody is checking. The tradition pairs this with unusual candour: the sign says the true thing, including the inconvenient true thing, and readings treat that as integrity rather than rudeness. Industriousness is the third theme — You is associated with early starts, long preparation and visible effort — and appearance is the fourth, since this is the branch the texts link with grooming, presentation and taking the trouble to look the part.

Pure metal has no give in it. The classical cautions describe criticism delivered accurately and received badly, a habit of correcting detail in situations where the detail was not the point, and difficulty distinguishing a standard from a preference. Because the sign values being right, apologising is described as disproportionately hard. Vanity appears in the folk material, usually as over-attention to how things look from outside. You is also one of the four self-punishing branches, and the reading fits the rest: the harshest audit the Rooster performs is on itself, conducted privately and without an appeal process.

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 Rooster 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.

You's Six Harmony partner is the Dragon, the pair that combines into Metal and which the tradition reads as vision given a specification — the sign most able to make the Dragon's plan buildable. Its Three Harmony frame is the metal trine with the Snake and the Ox, the alliance of strategy, precision and endurance, and the group where the Rooster's standards are least resented. Directly opposite is the Rabbit, the Six Clash: blunt speech against careful speech. The Dog stands in harm with You, the Rat in destruction, and the branch punishes itself when a second You appears.

You's fixed element is Metal, giving the sign white and gold as its traditional colours, four and nine as its numbers, and due West as its direction — the branch sits exactly at West on the twenty-four mountain compass. Earth produces Metal, so yellow and brown, five and ten, and the centre are the classical supporting set. These correspondences come from the five-element tables and imply nothing about outcomes.

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