What Korean saju does differently
The twelve animals are shared across East Asia, but the systems built on top of them are not interchangeable. Chinese BaZi and Korean saju use the same sixty-term cycle and arrive at different emphases; Korean readings lean harder on the branch a person is born under and on the relationships between branches — clash, harmony, harm, punishment — as the actual mechanism rather than as decoration. That is why every page here names the relation it is working from. If a claim cannot be traced back to a branch relation or an element, we have not written it down.
First, check which animal you are
Korean saju starts the year at ipchun (立春), the solar term that lands around February 4. Not January 1, and — this is the part that catches people — not Lunar New Year either, which is the cut most English-language zodiac calculators use. Lunar New Year moves between late January and late February, so for a large slice of birthdays the two systems disagree by a whole animal.
The practical rule is short. If you were born in January or the first days of February, you belong to the previous year's animal in this system. Adjacent animals read almost nothing alike, so it is worth getting right before you read anything else on this site.
The twelve animals
- Year of the Rat子 · WaterThe one who noticed the exit before anyone asked where it was
- Year of the Ox丑 · EarthThe one who keeps going long after the encouragement stops
- Year of the Tiger寅 · WoodThe one who moves first and works out the cost on the way
- Year of the Rabbit卯 · WoodThe one who reads the room before the room knows it is being read
- Year of the Dragon辰 · EarthThe one who is always building something a size larger than the room expects
- Year of the Snake巳 · FireThe one who has already decided and is waiting for the right moment to say so
- Year of the Horse午 · FireThe one who is already halfway there while the meeting is still choosing a date
- Year of the Goat未 · EarthThe one who noticed how everyone in the room was doing and said nothing
- Year of the Monkey申 · MetalThe one who found the third option nobody had asked for
- Year of the Rooster酉 · MetalThe one who says the number out loud when everyone was managing without it
- Year of the Dog戌 · EarthThe one who stays after the interesting part is over
- Year of the Pig亥 · WaterThe one who gave the whole answer when a polite version would have done
2027: the Fire Goat year
2027 is 丁未 — Fire over Earth, which Korean saju reads as a consolidating year rather than an expanding one. What that means for you depends on how your own branch meets Goat: some signs sit in harmony with it, one sits directly opposite, and five have no formal relation to it at all. Each forecast below names which case it is before it says anything else.
What is not here
There is no birth-chart calculator on these pages yet, and that is deliberate. A full saju chart needs the true solar time of your birthplace to fix the hour pillar, and the engine behind this site currently assumes Seoul. For anyone born outside Korea the hour would come out wrong, and a chart with one wrong pillar is worse than no chart at all. The zodiac pages here work from the year branch alone, which needs only your date, so they are accurate wherever you were born.