Earthly Branches

Chinese timekeeping runs on two interlocking sets of signs: ten heavenly stems (天干, tiangan) and twelve earthly branches (地支, dizhi) — together covered by the umbrella term ganzhi (干支), and in older romanizations tien gan dizhi. Neither set is used alone. One stem and one branch, taken in step, form a two-character label — 甲子 jiazi, 乙丑 yichou, 丙寅 bingyin… — and because the two sets have different lengths, the labels run through sixty distinct combinations before returning to the start. That is the Chinese sexagenary cycle: the sixty-term counter that dates years, months, days, and hours on a Chinese calendar, and that supplies all eight characters of a Bazi chart. This page explains the two sets of signs, how the pairing produces sixty terms rather than a hundred and twenty, and where the system actually came from — a story that begins with carved oracle bones, not with books.

Each Gregorian year maps to one of twelve Chinese zodiac animals (生肖, shēngxiào), cycling in a fixed twelve-year order. Look up any birth year from 1924 to 2032 in the table below to find its animal, its earthly branch, its full stem-branch year pillar, and its element. A person born in 2024 is a Dragon, 2025 a Snake, 2026 a Horse — but the animal alone is only half the sign: the same animal returns every twelve years paired with a different element, so the full combination repeats only every sixty years.