1993 Chinese zodiac: the Water Rooster, guiyou, metal of the sword edge

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 1993 fell on January 23. 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 3:37 Beijing time. That leaves 12 days, January 23 to February 3, on which the two rules give different signs: a Water Rooster at the wedding table and a Water Monkey in a birth chart.

Everything before January 23 is the Water Monkey year of 1992, by the popular rule; everything from January 23 to February 9, 1994 is the Rooster's, after which the Wood Dog took over. A birthday in January or early February 1994 is therefore still a Water Rooster, which surprises people every year. By the Lichun rule the Rooster year ran from February 4, 1993 at 3:37 to February 4, 1994 at 9:30. 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 Rooster" is an English convenience. The year's real name is two characters, 癸酉, guiyou: a heavenly stem, gui, which is yin Water and supplies the element, and an earthly branch, you, which carries the Rooster 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 guiyou is number 10 of the sixty, which is why the same Water Rooster last appeared in 1933 and returns in 2053. 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 1993 is the second, yin half of metal of the sword edge, the sound it shares with 1992. The Ming manual that every later almanac copied, the Sanming Tonghui of 1578, gives the pair the most martial entry of the thirty: the White Emperor holds power, hardness comes from a hundred firings, a red light shoots at the Dipper and the Ox, a white blade congeals in frost and snow. This metal cannot be born without water, it says; it is the sharpest of all metals; only water suits it and fire does not.

Why the Rooster, of all creatures, carries a blade is a fair question, and the manual answers it without mentioning the bird at all. It reads the twelve branches as a human life, and the Rooster's branch, you, sits with the Monkey's at the harvest, the season when things are gathered in and a person withdraws and comes to rest. You is also, with shen, the proper seat of metal in the five-element scheme, and the stem of 1993, gui, is yin water. Metal in its own seat, tempered by water: that, the book says, is a sword edge, the point at which metal's usefulness reaches its peak. The animal came to the branch centuries after the branch came to the calendar, so the Rooster inherited the sword rather than earning it, which is the kind of thing worth knowing before anyone sells you a "sword-edge Rooster personality."

The manual does say one thing about guiyou meeting its own kind, meaning two pillars in one chart. Metal likes metal, so guiyou with guiyou is good, and given wood to work on it is twisted roots and knotted joints, the hard timber that proves a good tool. Borrowed as a compliment to two people born in 1993 it is charming. As a forecast it is nothing, and the same author writes in the same book that the sages spoke in figures not meant to be gripped too tightly. It sets the pair against its opposite, the years of gold leaf, and calls the difference hard against soft; if you want an image to keep, keep that one, and then let a birth chart tell you which of your eight characters is actually you.

A 1993 birthday carries three elements at once: Water from the stem (the one a horoscope means), Metal from the Rooster'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 Rooster 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 Rooster alive, whether born in 1993 or 1933. 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 1993 Rooster matches the way every Rooster does. Four positions on the wheel have names, and each has a page reading the pairing with the rule behind the verdict.

The Rooster comes round every twelve years and the Water Rooster every sixty. The year element steps through Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water in turn, so the Rooster of 2005 is a Wood Rooster and the one before, 1981, was a Metal Rooster. Each year's start date is on the Rooster page.