Horse

The Horse is paired with wu, the seventh earthly branch, whose double-hour runs from eleven in the morning to one in the afternoon, the hour of noon, and whose phase is fire. It stands exactly opposite the Rat at midnight, the two poles of the daily and yearly cycle. The horse in Chinese culture is the animal of the frontier, of cavalry and of the tribute trade with the steppe peoples, and it carries associations of speed, freedom, martial vigour and travel. The Heavenly Horses of Ferghana, sought by the Han emperor Wu, entered legend as horses that sweated blood, and horse imagery runs through Chinese painting and poetry as an emblem of untamed energy. The traits given to the sign, independence, enthusiasm, restlessness and a dislike of confinement, follow from that.

Beyond the Ferghana horses sought by Emperor Wu, the wider Silk Road trade in horses from Central Asian steppe peoples remained a strategic Chinese state concern for most of the imperial period, since China's own pasturelands were poorly suited to breeding cavalry mounts in the numbers its armies required, making the horse one of the few animals of the cycle whose symbolic prestige was matched by a genuine, centuries-long logistical dependency on foreign supply that Chinese governments actively managed through treaty, trade and, at times, war.

The horse holds the most yang position in the cycle, the peak of the day and, in the yearly reckoning, the height of the solar half of the year, and the tradition reads it accordingly as the most outwardly directed of the signs. When the horse branch combines with a fire heavenly stem the result is the fire horse, bingwu, which comes round once in sixty years and carries in Japan a strong negative belief about women born in it; the effect on the Japanese birth rate in 1966 is well documented. The horse belongs to the san he triad with the Tiger and the Dog. It is worth noting that the cycle of twelve animals is used across a very large cultural area and that the same sign carries different weight in different places, so a Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese or Tibetan reading of the horse year will not be identical.

The horse's position at the peak of yang in the daily cycle, noon, and in the yearly cycle, midsummer, is structurally answered by the Rat's position at the opposite pole, midnight and, in some reckonings, the year's coldest depth, and Chinese cosmological texts consistently pair the two branches as the yang and yin extremes of a single cycle rather than treating either in isolation. The horse is also one of the very few animals of the twelve, along with the ox, whose economic importance to the historical Chinese state was managed through dedicated government bureaux, imperial horse-breeding administrations existing from the Han dynasty onward to secure cavalry mounts for the northern frontier.