Chinese Zodiac Database

73 entries. The twelve animals as a database: each animal, its attributed character, and how the compatibility scheme is actually computed from the earthly branches.

Each of the twelve animals is treated here as a cluster rather than a single article. One entry covers the attributed character, another covers the year and how to tell it from neighbouring years, another covers compatibility, and so on. Reading the cluster gives something closer to how the animal is actually used; reading only the personality entry is how most people form their impression of the system and it is also the thinnest part of it.

The thing worth knowing before anything else: the animal is not the unit of calculation. Every animal maps to an earthly branch — Rat to Zi, Ox to Chou, and so on — and compatibility is computed from relationships between those branches, not from any property of the animals themselves. Liuhe (六合) pairs branches six apart, Liuchong (六冲) pairs them six apart on the opposite axis, and the rest fall into patterns with their own names. The same machinery explains why the compatibility result for two animals is stable across centuries of sources.

Because it is computed rather than looked up, the compatibility calculator returns the actual branch relationship between any two animals, and the zodiac calculator resolves a birth date to its animal — which is not always the one people assume, since the year boundary follows the solar term rather than January 1.

What is not here: no yearly or monthly fortune, and no prediction of any kind. The attributed characters are folk descriptions collected over a very long period, interesting mostly because they have stayed consistent, not because they were ever tested.

Zodiac characterisations are folk attributions. Compatibility is a branch relationship — the system behind it is shown rather than asserted, and nothing here forecasts an outcome.