Tiger

The Tiger is paired with yin, the third earthly branch, whose double-hour runs from three to five in the morning and whose phase is wood. In China the tiger, not the lion, is the king of beasts, and its cultural weight goes far beyond the calendar. It is the White Tiger of the west, one of the four directional creatures that govern the quadrants of the sky along with the Azure Dragon, the Vermilion Bird and the Black Tortoise, and each quadrant holds seven of the twenty-eight lunar mansions. Tiger imagery was used protectively on children's shoes and hats, on doorways and on military insignia, and tiger amulets were held to drive off harmful influences. The traits given to the sign, courage, authority, unpredictability and a certain dangerous charisma, come out of this protective and formidable reputation rather than from any observation of tigers.

The Tiger's yin branch is yang in polarity despite the name coincidence with the Chinese word yin meaning shade or the feminine cosmic principle, an unrelated homophone in the Latin transliteration that has confused many English-language beginners; the branch yin and the philosophical yin are written with entirely different characters and share no etymological connection. In Korea the tiger carries even greater cultural weight than in China, serving as a national symbol and the protagonist of a vast body of folktales in which the tiger is by turns a fearsome predator and a foolish dupe outwitted by smaller animals, a comic register largely absent from the more uniformly regal Chinese treatment of the sign.

Signs in the cycle carry reputations that affect behaviour in measurable ways. The tiger year has a mixed one, thought in some regions to produce children of strong and difficult character, and in Japan the related sign of the Fire Horse year, hinoeuma, which comes once every sixty years, is associated with an old belief about the fate of women born in it; the Japanese birth rate fell sharply in the fire-horse year of 1966 and demographers have documented the drop. This is worth recording because it shows the calendar is not merely decorative: beliefs attached to the cycle have influenced marriage timing, birth timing and naming across east Asia. Anyone using the system should also know that the Chinese year begins not on 1 January but at the lunisolar new year, which falls between late January and late February, so that people born in January frequently belong to the previous animal.