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Korean saju, twelve animals

The Chinese zodiac, read the Korean way

Same twelve animals. A different cut of the calendar, and a different set of questions.

Start here

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.

Find your birth year below, then follow the animal beside it to that sign's page.

The twelve animals

2026: the Fire Horse year

2026 is 丙午 — Fire over Fire, which repeats the same element in the stem and branch. What that means for you depends on how your own branch meets Horse: one sign sits directly opposite it, 5 sit in some formal relation to it, and the remaining 6 have none at all. Each forecast below names which case it is before it says anything else.

2027: the Fire Goat year

2027 is 丁未 — Fire over Earth, which is classified as the stem element generating the branch element. What that means for you depends on how your own branch meets Goat: one sign sits directly opposite it, 6 sit in some formal relation to it, and the remaining 5 have none 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.

Also in English

The rest of the site (Korean)

Everything else is in Korean — listed here so you know what exists. Nothing on these pages needs an account, and each page says what it needs before you type anything.