1990 Chinese zodiac: the Metal Horse, gengwu, earth by the roadside

The two rules were eight days apart in 1990. Chinese New Year, which a zodiac sign follows, fell on January 27, 1990; Lichun, the solar start of spring that a bazi chart and a feng shui kua number follow, did not arrive until February 4, 1990 at 10:14 Beijing time. A baby born in between, January 27 to February 3, was a Metal Horse at the family table and an Earth Snake in a birth chart, because the jisi year of 1989 still held the year pillar. Anyone born earlier in January is an Earth Snake by both rules.

The split opened again at the far end. By Chinese New Year the Horse year lasted until February 14, 1991; by Lichun it ended on February 4, 1991 at 16:08, ten days sooner. A birth after that moment and up to February 14, 1991 is a Metal Horse to the family and a Metal Goat in a chart. Why there are two rules at all is the subject of the Lichun page; the year-boundaries dataset lists both dates for every year from 1900 to 2100.

The lunar year that began in 1990 was a long one: 384 days, from January 27, 1990 to February 14, 1991, because it carried a thirteenth month. The calendar slips in a leap month about seven times every nineteen years to keep its moons in step with the seasons, and in 1990 the extra month was a second fifth month, which ran from June 23 to July 21. A year that long also catches the solar calendar twice. Lichun, the start of spring, fell on February 4, 1990, eight days after the year opened, and again on February 4, 1991, ten days before it closed. The Horse year of 1990 contained two springs.

That combination has a name: double spring with a leap month. Folk belief reads the two Lichun days as a double helping of spring's yang and a lucky year to marry; Malaysia's The Star reported a wedding surge on exactly this reasoning when the 2025 Snake year repeated it. The mirror image is a short year with no Lichun in it at all, called a widow year, and it is avoided for weddings: the South China Morning Post warned in 2024 that the Dragon year, a widow year, could dent China's marriage numbers. 1990 sits between two of them. The lunar years of 1989 and 1991 each fell entirely between one Lichun and the next and contained none.

If you were born between June 23 and July 21, 1990, your lunar birthday is in that leap month, and most years do not have one. A leap fifth month came back in 1998 and 2009 and returns next in 2028; in the years between, a lunar birthday from it has no date of its own to fall on. Everyone else born in 1990 has an ordinary lunar birthday, and the date converter finds it for any year.

"Metal Horse" is shorthand. The year's name is 庚午, gengwu, number 7 of the sixty: the stem geng is yang Metal, and the branch wu, which carries the Horse, is Fire (the Huainanzi already files them so before 139 BC), and the name sets metal on top of the element that melts it. Inside the branch the picture softens. Wu hides two stems, ding fire and ji earth, and earth is what feeds metal, so the year's stem stands on its own pressure and its own support at once. The same gengwu came round in 1930 and returns in 2050. How ten stems and twelve branches make sixty names is explained alongside the twenty-two characters themselves.

1990 and its yin partner 1991 carry a third name besides the year name and the animal: earth by the roadside, their nayin or "received sound" (all thirty are listed on the sexagenary cycle page). Wan Minying's Sanming Tonghui, the 1578 manual the later almanacs drew on, opens its entry on this earth with a landscape: the great earth joined up by roads, level fields by the ten thousand acres, the soil that grain depends on to grow and that grass and trees flourish from. It is warm earth, it says, fire-warmed and mild, the kind that raises everything; and so it wants water first, then metal to help the harvest set. That is the whole image, and it is worth holding onto because it is friendlier than "Metal Horse" sounds.

The same book explains why the roadside got the earth. It reads the twelve branches as a human life, and puts the Horse's branch, wu, together with the Goat's, wei, at the point where a person is fifty or sixty and it can finally be seen how rich or poor, high or low, the life turned out. Things are formed, it says of these two positions; they show themselves on the road; there is something you can hold and something you can see. A year at that point of the circle takes an earth that is out in the open and in use. Then it adds a detail that belongs to 1990 in particular: a gengwu meeting a xinwei, its own partner, is a pairing of the two principles, yang matched with yin, and it calls that match noble without exception. The manual means two pillars in one chart, a gengwu year with a xinwei month, say; borrow it for two people born in 1990 and 1991 and you have a compliment the old book never quite paid, but would not have minded.

One more line, because it is the kind of thing only the source has. Among the special patterns the manual borrows from the Miaoxuan, another manual it quotes, is one it names the golden horse neighing in the wind: a person born in a gengwu or a jiawu year whose birth hour is xinsi, the si hour, nine to eleven in the morning. It ranks the pattern as noble. Whether you were born in those two hours is not something a zodiac page can tell you, since it is the fourth pillar of a birth chart; the form above will, if you give it a time. All of this is imagery, the manual's own word for it, not measurement, and the same author says in the same book that the sages spoke in figures and did not mean them to be gripped too tightly.

A 1990 birthday carries three elements, and in this year they line up. Metal is the stem's, the one a horoscope means by "Metal Horse"; Fire is the Horse's branch, the one the trines use; Earth is the sound. Fire makes earth and earth makes metal, so the three run as one generating chain from the sign through the sound to the year element, with the roadside earth in the middle handing one on to the other. The zodiac elements page keeps the three apart; a bazi reader's "you" is a fourth, the day master, which the form above finds.

For a 1990 Horse the current years make an unusual pair. 2026 is the Horse's own year, the first since 2014 and the one this cohort turns 36 in; 2027 is a Goat year, and the Goat is the Horse's secret friend, so a year the tables read as exposed is followed by one they read as backing. The tables look only at the branch, which means a Horse born in 1930 would get the same two cards: a position and its rule, with no fortune attached.

Compatibility tables pair animals and ignore the year element, but several of their pairings land on real years close to 1990. The Goat is the Horse's secret friend, and 1991 is a Goat year that also shares 1990's sound, so a couple born in 1990 and 1991 has the harmony and the nayin in common. The Rat, the Horse's clash, falls in 1984 and 1996; the Ox, its harm, in 1985 and 1997; the Rabbit, its destruction, in 1987 and 1999. Two 1990 Horses share a branch the punishment tables read against itself, which the tradition takes as a reason for patience rather than a bar.

The Horse returns every twelve years, the Metal Horse every sixty; start dates for each are on the Horse page.