Chinese Zodiac

What's Your Zodiac Animal?

Each zodiac animal's year comes around every 12 years, and each year is associated with a zodiac animal. The most recent zodiac sign years are shown below.

Each Chinese zodiac animal has personality traits assigned to it by the ancient Chinese. Chinese people believe these traits will be embodied in people, according to their zodiac sign.

Chinese Zodiac Origins — Why 12 Animals

The 12 animals were chosen deliberately, after many revisions. The zodiac animals are either closely related to ancient Chinese people's daily lives, or have lucky meanings.

Chinese zodiac uses the principles of yin and yang. Since the zodiac animal cycle of 12 is divisible by two, every zodiac sign can occur only as either Yin or Yang.?

Get to know Chinese Zodiac story.

Ben Ming Nian (Zodiac Year of Birth)

As the Chinese zodiac recurs every 12 years, your animal year will come around when you are 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, etc. According to ancient Chinese superstition, in your birth sign year, you will offend the God of Age, and will have bad luck during that year. ?Read more on How to be Lucky in Your Zodiac Year.

Chinese Zodiac Hours — Every hour has an animal.

It is widely known that each year is associated with a Chinese zodiac animal, but the animal signs are also assigned to months, days of the week, and hours.

According to professional Chinese astrology, a person's personality and life is more decided by his/her birth hour than year. Zodiac hours, days, months, and years are used together for in-depth character and destiny analysis. In popular astrology, by contrast, only the birth year is used.

In ancient times, in order to tell the time, people divided a day into twelve 2-hour periods, and designated an animal to represent each period, according to each animal's “special time, according to an ancient mnemonic and common observations.

Chinese Zodiac Years are based on Chinese lunar calendar

There are two dates a Chinese zodiac year could be said to start on:

• Chinese New Year (day 1 of the lunar year), which is somewhere in the period January 21 to February 20
• Start of Spring (day 1 of the solar year), the first day of the first solar term in the traditional Chinese solar calendar, which falls in the period February 3–5.

Most Chinese people use lunar new year as the start of the zodiac year. But for professional fortune telling, Chinese astrologers use 'Start of Spring' or solar new year as the beginning of the zodiac year.

Chinese Zodiac is Used to Predict People's Fortune

To make a relatively correct Chinese fortune prediction, people take many methods into consideration, such as face characteristics, palmistry, and more involved Chinese astrology including birth month, day, and hour, gender, etc.

Zodiac fortune prediction by birth year is only one of these methods. So you may only take Chinese zodiac birth sign horoscopes as a general reference.

• Fortune Telling in China — Methods, Benefits, and Tips.
• Palmistry — a Quick Chinese Palm Reading Guide

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