Chinese zodiac
Year of the Monkey猴
Clever, adaptable and rarely stuck. The sign of someone who solves it a different way.
- Earthly branch
- Shen
- Hours
- 15:00–17:00
- Fixed element
- Metal
- Season
- Early autumn
- Direction
- West-southwest
Said to be good at
- inventive
- learns fast
- socially agile
- finds a route around obstacles
And warned about
- easily bored
- cuts corners
- can be too clever for its own good
- avoids depth
The Monkey is the trickster of the cycle, and Chinese literature gave it its most famous figure — Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of *Journey to the West*, who is brilliant, insubordinate and impossible to keep contained. The sign inherits all three.
Readings emphasise inventiveness and speed of learning. The Monkey is associated with problems that yield to a different approach rather than more effort, and with people who are genuinely good at many things.
The classical warning is about depth. A sign that learns quickly is tempted to stop at competent, and the texts describe the Monkey as prone to boredom the moment something stops being a puzzle.
Occupational readings put the Monkey in invention, entertainment, technology and anything where the useful move is an unexpected one. The tradition considers the sign excellent at starting and unreliable at maintaining.
Monkey years have a reputation for the unexpected — reversals, clever solutions, and situations that turn out differently than they looked. The advice attached is to stay flexible rather than committed.
The Monkey's triangle is with the Rat and the Dragon — the improvisers. The Monkey supplies invention where the Rat supplies opportunism and the Dragon supplies nerve, and the tradition treats this set as brilliant and unreliable in roughly equal measure.
Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, is one of the most recognisable figures in Chinese literature: born from stone, master of seventy-two transformations, and so ungovernable that heaven itself could not contain him until the Buddha intervened. Everything the sign is said to be — clever, irreverent, impossible to keep still — is in that character.
Monkey years
The same animal returns every twelve years, but with a different element each time — the full pairing repeats only every sixty. The date is when that Chinese year began.
| Year | Element | Began |
|---|---|---|
| 1920 | Metal Monkey | 1920-02-20 |
| 1932 | Water Monkey | 1932-02-06 |
| 1944 | Wood Monkey | 1944-01-25 |
| 1956 | Fire Monkey | 1956-02-12 |
| 1968 | Earth Monkey | 1968-01-30 |
| 1980 | Metal Monkey | 1980-02-16 |
| 1992 | Water Monkey | 1992-02-04 |
| 2004 | Wood Monkey | 2004-01-22 |
| 2016 | Fire Monkey | 2016-02-08 |
| 2028 | Earth Monkey | 2028-01-26 |
| 2040 | Metal Monkey | 2040-02-12 |
Born in January or early February? Check the date in the last column — if your birthday falls before it, your sign is the previous year's.
Your own year is not lucky
This surprises people who expect the opposite. In Chinese belief your běnmìngnián — the return of your own animal, every twelfth year — is considered a year of friction rather than fortune. The traditional explanation is that you come to the attention of Tai Sui, the deity of the year, and being noticed is not an advantage.
The customary protection is to wear red: a belt, socks, underwear, a cord at the wrist — usually given by someone else rather than bought for yourself, which is part of the custom. Red goods sell measurably better in the relevant years, so the belief is held widely enough to show up in retail figures.
For the Monkey, the last own year began in 2016 (Fire Monkey) and the next is 2028, from 2028-01-26 — a Earth Monkey. Anyone born under this sign in one of those years is in their own year for the whole of it, not on their birthday.
The five Monkeys
The same animal returns every twelve years, but with a different element each time. The pairing repeats only every sixty — so a Monkey born under one element and one born under another are read as different signs, not the same one twice.
- Wood Monkey
- the most principled Monkey — cleverness applied to something beyond itself.
- Fire Monkey
- the quickest and the most competitive. Invention with something to prove.
- Earth Monkey
- the Monkey that follows through, which the tradition treats as the sign's best case.
- Metal Monkey
- the Monkey's own element — sharp, ambitious and the most likely to succeed materially.
- Water Monkey
- the most persuasive, and the version most inclined to solve things through people.
Matches and clashes
Traditional compatibility follows the geometry of the cycle rather than personality: signs four apart form a harmonious triangle, and the sign directly opposite — six apart — is the clash.
The other eleven
Written and reviewed by Lunasomnia