1992 Chinese zodiac: the Water Monkey, renshen, metal of the sword edge

Two rules decide when a Chinese year starts, and in most years they disagree by a week or two. A zodiac sign follows Chinese New Year, the second new moon after the winter solstice, which in 1992 fell on February 4. 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 21:48 in the evening, Beijing time. The same day. So 1992 is one of the rare years in which the two rules agree on every date but one, and on that one they split by the hour: a birth on February 4 before 21:48 is a Metal Goat by the bazi rule and a Water Monkey by the popular one, and a birth after it is a Water Monkey by both.

For everyone else the answer is clean. January 1992, all of it, belongs to the Metal Goat year of 1991. From February 4 the year is the Monkey's, and it stayed so until January 22, 1993, when the Water Rooster took over; by the Lichun rule it ran until February 4, 1993 at 3:37. A January 1993 birthday is therefore still a Water Monkey by the popular rule. 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.

"Water Monkey" is an English convenience. The year's real name is two characters, 壬申, renshen: a heavenly stem, ren, which is yang Water and supplies the element, and an earthly branch, shen, which carries the Monkey and is Metal 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 renshen is number 9 of the sixty, which is why the same Water Monkey last appeared in 1932 and returns in 2052. 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 1992 shares metal of the sword edge with 1993. The Ming manual that every later almanac copied, the Sanming Tonghui of 1578, gives it the most martial entry of the thirty: the White Emperor holds power, it begins, hardness comes from a hundred firings, a red light shoots up at the Dipper and the Ox, a white blade congeals in frost and snow. This metal, it goes on, cannot be born without water, and it closes the entry with the plainest ranking in the book: the sword edge is the sharpest of all metals, and only water suits it, never fire.

The same book explains why this pair of years got the blade. It reads the twelve branches as a life, and it puts the Monkey's branch, shen, together with the Rooster's, you, at the harvest: the season of gathering in, when things are done growing and a person draws back and comes to rest. Shen and you are also the proper seat of metal in the five-element scheme, and the stems that fall on them in these two years, ren and gui, are both water. Metal in its own seat, quenched in water: the manual says that is the image of a sword edge, the point at which metal's usefulness reaches its peak. It then sets this pair against its opposite, the renyin and guimao years of gold leaf, and calls the difference one of hard and soft, which is a fair summary of a blade and a sheet of foil.

There is a line in the entry that people born in 1992 may enjoy. Metal likes its own kind, the manual says, so a renshen meeting a renshen is good, and if there is wood for the blade to work on, that is twisted roots and knotted joints, the hard timber that shows what a good tool is. The manual is talking about two pillars in one chart. Borrowed for two people born in the same year it makes a nice compliment. Read as a forecast it is nothing of the sort, and the manual's own author says in the same book that these images are figures the sages spoke in, not to be gripped too tightly. The blade, the water, the harvest: that is the year's name, and the name is where a birth chart starts rather than where it ends.

A 1992 birthday carries three elements at once: Water from the stem (the one a horoscope means), Metal from the Monkey's own branch (the one the compatibility trines are built on), and Metal by the sound above. Which one is "yours" depends on who is asking; the zodiac elements page keeps the three apart, and the Monkey 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 Monkey alive, whether born in 1992 or 1932. 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 1992 Monkey matches the way every Monkey does. Four positions on the wheel have names, and each has a page reading the pairing with the rule behind the verdict.

The Monkey comes round every twelve years and the Water Monkey every sixty. The year element steps through Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water in turn, so the Monkey of 2004 is a Wood Monkey and the one before, 1980, was a Metal Monkey. Each year's start date is on the Monkey page.