Years

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A year entry in this atlas records one turn of the Chinese sexagenary cycle, the sixty year system that pairs ten heavenly stems, each carrying one of five elements across two consecutive years, with twelve earthly branches, each carrying one of the familiar zodiac animals. The pairing is not built independently for each cycle: stem and branch advance together in lockstep, so the same exact combination, the same stem, the same branch, the same element, only returns once every sixty years, and an entry names that specific year type as it lands on a Gregorian calendar year, taking its identity from the lunar new year that falls within it.

An entry records the sexagenary name itself, its ordinal position within the sixty year cycle, the ruling element and the zodiac animal the earthly branch carries, and the plain, honestly stated traditional reading given to a year of that stem, branch and element combination, resourcefulness and quick starts for a Rat year, precision and firm resolve for a Metal year, without presenting that reading as settled fact rather than as the tradition's own account of it.

Because the cycle repeats every sixty years, an entry also names the nearest Gregorian years, one cycle back and one cycle forward, that share the identical sexagenary identity, letting a reader see the pattern the cycle itself is built from rather than treating each year as an isolated entry.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, in the volume covering mathematics and the sciences of the heavens and the earth, is the standard scholarly history of how the sexagenary cycle came to organize Chinese timekeeping, tracing the stem and branch system back through the Shang dynasty's own use of the sixty day cycle for naming days, centuries before the same paired sequence was extended to name years as well.

Needham's account documents the cycle as a genuine mathematical structure, ten stems and twelve branches advancing together rather than independently, whose least common multiple of sixty is the entire reason a full return to any one combination takes exactly sixty years, a property the system's own users have long understood and built ceremony around, the sixtieth birthday marking a complete cycle in traditional East Asian reckoning.

The history recorded here also traces how the five elements, themselves an older and separate Chinese cosmological scheme, were layered onto the ten heavenly stems relatively late, two stems to an element across two consecutive years, and how the twelve zodiac animals attached to the branches through a documented, though not perfectly settled, textual history rather than an origin as old as the stems and branches themselves.

An entry draws on this documented scholarly history for the cycle's own mechanics and chronology, keeping the plain historical fact, how the sixty year pattern actually works and where each of its parts came from, separate from the traditional divinatory readings a year's stem, branch and element combination is popularly given.