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

Two rules decide when a Chinese year starts. A zodiac sign follows Chinese New Year, the second new moon after the winter solstice, which in 1990 fell on January 27. A bazi chart, a feng shui kua number and anything else the astrologers cast follows Lichun, the start of spring on the solar calendar, which fell on February 4 at 10:14 Beijing time. That leaves 8 days, January 27 to February 3, on which the two rules give different signs: a Metal Horse at the wedding table and an Earth Snake in a birth chart.

Everything before January 27 is the Earth Snake year of 1989, by the popular rule; everything from January 27 to February 14, 1991 is the Horse's, after which the Metal Goat took over. A birthday in January or early February 1991 is therefore still a Metal Horse, which surprises people every year. By the Lichun rule the Horse year ran from February 4, 1990 at 10:14 to February 4, 1991 at 16:08. The year-boundaries dataset has both dates for every year from 1900 to 2100, and the Lichun page explains why two rules exist at all.

"Metal Horse" is an English convenience. The year's real name is two characters, 庚午, gengwu: a heavenly stem, geng, which is yang Metal and supplies the element, and an earthly branch, wu, which carries the Horse and is Fire in its own right. The Huainanzi, a Han compendium finished before 139 BC, assigns both in a single sentence. Ten stems against twelve branches make sixty names before the first comes round again, and gengwu is number 7 of the sixty, which is why the same Metal Horse last appeared in 1930 and returns in 2050. The twenty-two characters and the sixty names each have a page of their own.

Every pair of years in the sixty-year count shares a poetic third name, the nayin or "received sound," and 1990 and 1991 share earth by the roadside. The Ming manual that every later almanac copied, the Sanming Tonghui of 1578, opens its entry on it 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 at once: Metal from the stem (the one a horoscope means), Fire from the Horse's own branch (the one the compatibility trines are built on), and Earth by the sound above. Which one is "yours" depends on who is asking; the zodiac elements page keeps the three apart, and the Horse page owns the sign itself, its personality reading and its five kinds. None of the three is what a bazi reader means by "you": that is the stem of the day you were born, the day master, and the form above finds it.

The tables that read a sign against a year work on the branches, so what they say about 2026 is true of every Horse alive, whether born in 1990 or 1930. Here is the position, with the rule, and no fortune attached.

The traditional match tables never look at the year element; they pair the animal, which means a 1990 Horse matches the way every Horse does. Four positions on the wheel have names, and each has a page reading the pairing with the rule behind the verdict.

The Horse comes round every twelve years and the Metal Horse every sixty. The year element steps through Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water in turn, so the Horse of 2002 is a Water Horse and the one before, 1978, was an Earth Horse. Each year's start date is on the Horse page.