Sheng Xiao 生肖
Shēng Xiào · The twelve animal signs — the popular face of the branch cycle.
What it means
Sheng Xiao is the set of twelve animals attached to the twelve Earthly Branches: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig. The branches came first and the animals were attached to them later, which is why the animals have no independent rules — every statement about a sign is a statement about its branch.
Why it matters
The animal cycle is the part of the system everyone knows, and also the part most often overstated. A sign is one of eight characters in a chart, and it is the coarsest of the eight, shared by roughly one person in twelve. It is genuinely useful for the branch relationships it encodes and for the cultural material attached to it, and it is a weak instrument for anything more specific than that.
| # | Animal | Branch | Element | Recent years |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rat | 子 (Zi) | Water | 2020 |
| 2 | Ox | 丑 (Chou) | Earth | 2021 |
| 3 | Tiger | 寅 (Yin) | Wood | 2022 |
| 4 | Rabbit | 卯 (Mao) | Wood | 2023 |
| 5 | Dragon | 辰 (Chen) | Earth | 2024 |
| 6 | Snake | 巳 (Si) | Fire | 2025 |
| 7 | Horse | 午 (Wu) | Fire | 2026 |
| 8 | Goat | 未 (Wei) | Earth | 2027 |
| 9 | Monkey | 申 (Shen) | Metal | 2016 |
| 10 | Rooster | 酉 (You) | Metal | 2017 |
| 11 | Dog | 戌 (Xu) | Earth | 2018 |
| 12 | Pig | 亥 (Hai) | Water | 2019 |
Where this site uses it
This site keeps the two layers separate: profile pages describe the sign itself, which does not change, and yearly pages describe how a given year meets it.