Ten Stems, Twelve Branches, Sixty Pairs

Ten Stems, Twelve Branches, Sixty Pairs

Two gears turn inside every saju chart. One has ten teeth and the other has twelve. Start them together and they click through sixty positions before they line up again. That cycle names years, months and days across East Asia, and it gives 2027 its name: Jeong-Mi, the Fire Goat (also called the Fire Sheep).

This guide looks at the gears themselves. For the full list of names and the way a chart is built, see The Four Pillars. For the big picture, start with What Is Saju?.

Two sets, two kinds of number

The ten are the heavenly stems. The twelve are the earthly branches. The pairing is often tied to an old way of thinking about numbers: ten is the number of heaven, and twelve is the number of earth. The ten stems are also compared to a tree trunk and the twelve branches to the limbs that grow from it.

Both sets carry a yin or yang label, and the encyclopedia sorts them by the five elements. It adds that they also stand for directions and seasons. The branches take on more jobs: they stand for the twelve animals, the months and the hours of the day.

Down each row the labels alternate: yang, yin, yang, yin. Keep that in mind, because it decides which stems and branches can meet.

A very old cycle with a legendary start

The encyclopedia's entry on stems and branches opens with legend. A later chronicle credits the Yellow Emperor, a legendary ruler, with having an official create the cycle of sixty. The encyclopedia puts more weight on the written record, and from the Han dynasty onward, it says, yin-yang and five-elements scholars used the system for ordinary calendars and for judging good and bad fortune alike. What Is Saju? covers the older evidence and the arrival in Korea.

How ten and twelve mesh

Write the stems in a row and the branches in a row beneath them, then keep going. Gap-Ja is first, Eul-Chuk second, Byeong-In third. After the tenth pair the stems start over while the branches carry on, so the eleventh pair is Gap-Sul. After sixty pairs both rows return to the start together, and Gap-Ja comes round again. It stops at sixty, not 120, because the two rows first line up again after sixty steps. A side effect is that a yang stem only ever meets a yang branch, so only half of the 120 possible pairs appear. What Is Saju? explains this in more detail.

Two counts follow from this. Each stem appears six times in the cycle, and each branch appears five times. In other words, from the animal side: sixty years hold the twelve-year animal round five times.

One list, three jobs

The same sixty names do three jobs. In Korean calendars the three are called taese (the year), wolgeon (the month) and iljin (the day), and a perpetual calendar prints all of them.

Years. Naming years by their pair is called the stem-and-branch year count. Because a pair returns every sixty years, the encyclopedia says it cannot date events far apart. It is handy for talking about a person's age or a flood or drought people remember. A person born in a Gap-Ja year meets another Gap-Ja year sixty years later. Koreans celebrate that return with hwangap, the birthday that arrives sixty years after birth. In the traditional Korean way of counting age, the encyclopedia says, it falls at age 61.

Months. A saju month takes the branches in order, starting from In, and its stem follows a fixed table tied to the year's stem (the table is in The Four Pillars). With twelve months a year, month names repeat every sixty months, which is five years.

Days. Days move through the cycle without a pause. The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty record each day by its pair. When the colonial-era almanac of the early 1940s dropped the lunar dates, the encyclopedia notes, it still printed the day pairs in order.

Try it: a year pair in two steps

Here is a shortcut for any year. Use the saju year, so for a birthday before Ipchun, use the year before.

  1. Stem: take the last digit of the year. 4 is Gap, 5 is Eul, 6 is Byeong, 7 is Jeong, 8 is Mu, 9 is Gi, 0 is Gyeong, 1 is Shin (yin Metal), 2 is Im and 3 is Gye.
  2. Branch: subtract 4 from the year, divide by 12 and keep the remainder. Count from the Rat: 0 Rat, 1 Ox, 2 Tiger, 3 Rabbit, 4 Dragon, 5 Snake, 6 Horse, 7 Goat, 8 Monkey, 9 Rooster, 10 Dog, 11 Pig.

Test it on 1911. The last digit is 1, so the stem is Shin (yin Metal). Then 1911 minus 4 is 1907, and 1907 divided by 12 leaves 11, which is the Pig, the Hae branch. The encyclopedia's own sample chart for a person born in 1911 has the year pillar Shin-Hae.

Color plus animal: an old nickname habit

The encyclopedia also records a habit among yin-yang specialists of nicknaming each pair with the stem's color and the branch's animal. Gap-Ja was the Blue Rat, Byeong-In the Red Tiger and Mu-Jin the Yellow Dragon.

2027: a Jeong-Mi year

Now put the gears to work. The pair for 2027 is Jeong-Mi.

  • Jeong is the fourth stem, yin Fire. Our site pictures it as Firefly, one of our own images (see What Is a Day Master?).
  • Mi is the eighth branch, the Goat, and it belongs to Earth.
  • Following the alternating pattern, Jeong is a yin stem and Mi is a yin branch. The two always share the same polarity, so they can pair. Jeong-Mi is number 44 of the 60.

In English it is the Fire Goat. The year begins at Ipchun, around February 4, 2027, not on January 1 (see The Four Pillars).

The same pair last opened a year in 1967 and comes round again in 2087. Someone born in the 1967 saju year meets their own pair again in 2027, the sixty-year return behind hwangap.

The pair also turns up inside the year. The saju months of 2027 run Im-In, Gye-Myo, Gap-Jin, Eul-Sa and Byeong-O, and then the sixth month, which opens around July 7 at Soseo, is Jeong-Mi again. The year closes with Gye-Chuk.

None of this tells you how the year goes for you. For themes by Day Master, see the 2027 Korean Saju Forecast for All Ten Types.

Where to go next

  1. Find your pillars in the free Saju calculator.
  2. Learn the structure in The Four Pillars.
  3. Meet the stem that stands for you in What Is a Day Master?.

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