Year of the Dog
The Dog is the eleventh of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, the animal of the earthly branch 戌 xū. The last Dog year ran from 16 February 2018 to 4 February 2019; the next, a Metal Dog, begins on 3 February 2030 and ends on 22 January 2031.
Meaning
The dog, 狗 gǒu in Chinese (犬 quǎn in older texts), is the eleventh animal in the cycle of twelve that names the years of the Chinese calendar; the Hong Kong Observatory’s calendar calls 2030, a Geng-xu year, the “year of the Dog”. Its branch is earth among the five elements, a link Taiwan Panorama traced in its 1994 Year of the Dog article to Wang Chong’s Lunheng. The same article calls the dog the first animal humans domesticated and tells how it came to be seen as a guard against evil, and records temples where dogs are still honoured: Kou She Yeh, protector of small children, in Quanzhou in Fujian, and the faithful dog of the Temple of the Eighteen Princes on Taiwan’s north coast, which jumped into its drowned masters’ grave. A Taiwanese rhyme gives the sign the line “eleventh the dog, barking at the paramour”. Reading a person’s character from their birth animal is a recent development, the Victoria and Albert Museum notes, not found in ancient Chinese texts. For the dog in other traditions, see dog symbolism.
Origin and history
The dog is missing from the oldest surviving list of the twelve animals. On Qin bamboo slips of before 217 BC from Shuihudi in Hubei, the branch 戌 xū is paired with 老羊, an “old sheep”, People’s Weekly quotes the text, and the list has a deer where today’s has none; Taiwan Panorama writes that later, for unknown reasons, the deer was squeezed out and the dog pulled in. Han slips from Kongjiapo in Suizhou pair 戌 with 老火, “old fire”, which Fan Guodong of the Hubei Provincial Museum’s archaeology institute suggested to the Wuhan Evening News in 2015 might be the fenyang, the prodigy of the earth that Confucius names in the Guoyu.
Wang Chong’s Lunheng of the first century AD has the dog in place: “戍土也，其禽犬也”, “xu is earth; its creature is the dog.” The theorists he argued with said that because wood overcomes earth, the dog submits to the tiger; Wang Chong turned the theory round, asking why the monkey (metal) fears the dog (earth) when earth does not overcome metal. Another scheme, which Taiwan Panorama describes and Fan Guodong credits to historians, sorted the animals into yin and yang by their toes: odd numbers for the yang branches, and the dog, with five claws, is yang.
Years of the Dog
Each Dog year begins on the Lunar New Year and ends the day before the next one, as the Hong Kong Observatory’s Gregorian–Lunar calendar conversion tables give the dates.
| Year | Element | Begins | Ends |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1934 | Wood | 14 February 1934 | 3 February 1935 |
| 1946 | Fire | 2 February 1946 | 21 January 1947 |
| 1958 | Earth | 18 February 1958 | 7 February 1959 |
| 1970 | Metal | 6 February 1970 | 26 January 1971 |
| 1982 | Water | 25 January 1982 | 12 February 1983 |
| 1994 | Wood | 10 February 1994 | 30 January 1995 |
| 2006 | Fire | 29 January 2006 | 17 February 2007 |
| 2018 | Earth | 16 February 2018 | 4 February 2019 |
| 2030 | Metal | 3 February 2030 | 22 January 2031 |
Someone born in January or early February belongs to the previous animal if they were born before that year’s Lunar New Year. The Observatory, and China’s national calendar standard of 2017, change the year on Lunar New Year’s Day; fortune tellers, the Observatory notes, tend to change it at the solar term Spring Commences, about 4 February, which is why some tables give different dates. The element changes with the last digit of the year, because it comes from the year’s heavenly stem, and the Huainanzi gives the stems their elements: jia and yi are wood, bing and ding fire, wu and ji earth, geng and xin metal, ren and gui water. In Western years that makes 4 and 5 Wood, 6 and 7 Fire, 8 and 9 Earth, 0 and 1 Metal, 2 and 3 Water; the five elements page explains the sixty-year cycle they make with the animals.
Pan-hu, the dog ancestor
Some of China’s minority peoples trace their descent from a dog. The Hou Han shu tells of Pan-hu, the dog of the legendary emperor Di Ku, who brought back the head of an enemy general when the emperor had promised his youngest daughter to whoever did; the princess followed Pan-hu to the southern mountains and bore him twelve children. Taiwan Panorama writes that the Miao, She, Yao and other minority peoples still have the dog as a totem, in some places sacrificing to Pan-hu and refusing dog meat, and that the story lies behind the Japanese tale of the eight dogs of Satomi.
An emperor born in a Dog year
The Song emperor Huizong (reigned 1100–1125), born in a Dog year, once issued an edict banning the slaughter of dogs on a minister’s suggestion, Taiwan Panorama relates. Dissenters answered that the emperor Shenzong had been born in the Year of the Rat, and nobody had stopped people keeping cats.
The dog and its neighbours
The dog follows the rooster in the cycle, and Taiwan Panorama sees that in the many idioms that pair chickens with dogs, such as “chickens flying and dogs jumping” for panic, and in the Taiwanese “mother hens and puppy dogs” shaped from rice dough at the winter solstice. Matchmakers kept the two signs apart: “the gold cock weeps at the sight of the dog.”
The dog in the race
Encyclopaedia Britannica retells the popular legend of a race in which the first twelve animals across a river won places in the calendar in the order they finished. The dog came eleventh, second to last, after stopping to bathe or to play in the river; only the pig was slower.
Dogs in art
The National Palace Museum in Taipei holds Sleeping Dog by the Qing court painter Jin Tingbiao, a puppy in shades of ink that the Qianlong emperor stamped with his seals, and Giuseppe Castiglione’s portrait of Black Lion, a dog the Qianlong emperor named himself. The bronze dog head from the zodiac water clock at the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, looted in 1860, is still missing, CGTN reported in 2023.
Read next
- Next in Chinese zodiacYear of the PigThe Pig (in Japan, the Boar) is the twelfth and last of the animals of the Chinese zodiac, the animal of the earthly branch 亥 hài. The last Pig year ran from 5 February 2019 to 24 January 2020; the next, a Metal Pig, begins on 23 January 2031 and ends on 10 February 2032.
- Dogs in other traditions, beside the dog of the Chinese cycleDog symbolismIn the Odyssey the dog is the faithful one: Odysseus's old hound Argos knows him after twenty years away. In the British folklore John Brand collected, a dog howling at night near a sick person foretold a death, and Cherokee storytellers say the Milky Way is the trail of meal a dog spilled as it ran.
See also
Year of the Rooster, Year of the Rat, Year of the Ox, Year of the Tiger, Year of the Rabbit, Year of the Dragon.
Sources
- Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2030, Hong Kong Observatory, Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Tables (text files T1924e.txt to T2032e.txt, consulted 3 October 2026), Hong Kong Observatory, title line and the first day of the 1st Lunar Month; the year files T1930e–T2032e.txt were checked for every row of the table
- What year is it today?, Hong Kong Observatory, Educational Resources (2018), Hong Kong Observatory, article text
- Huainanzi, chapter 3 “Tianwen xun” (天文訓), 淮南子·天文訓, Chinese text, Wikisource (Chinese), passage on the stems, branches and five phases
- Lunheng, chapter 14 “Wu shi” (物勢), by Wang Chong, 王充《論衡·物勢》, Chinese text, Wikisource (Chinese), the correlation of branches, elements and animals
- 藏在博物馆里的鼠 (The rat in the museum), Yi Yi, 人民周刊 (People’s Weekly), March 2020, 人民周刊 (People’s Daily), second paragraph
- 十二生肖起源可推至战国 (The twelve animals go back to the Warring States), Wuhan Evening News (武汉晚报), 15 February 2015, reprinted by China News Service; interview with Fan Guodong, Hubei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, China News Service (中新网), article text, sections 夔变猴 老羊变狗 and 为何小老鼠当“领头羊”
- Chinese zodiac, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Chinese zodiac” (Frannie Comstock and the Britannica editors), Encyclopaedia Britannica, History and legend
- The lunar zodiac, Victoria and Albert Museum, “The lunar zodiac”, Victoria and Albert Museum, article text
- The NPM Zoo: Animal Paintings in the Museum Collection, National Palace Museum, Taipei, online story on Google Arts & Culture, National Palace Museum (Taipei), section Sleeping Dog
- A historic reunion of five Yuanmingyuan’s bronze zodiac animal heads, CGTN, 21 October 2023, CGTN, article text
- The Dog’s Tale, Chuang Po-he, tr. Robert Taylor, Taiwan Panorama, January 1994, Taiwan Panorama (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan), article text and captions
- Growing In the New Year: Let’s Talk Rooster, Sheng Chien, tr. Jonathan Barnard, Taiwan Panorama, February 1993, Taiwan Panorama (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan), picture caption
- Pegged for a Lifetime: Chinese and the Zodiac, Chang Chung-fang, tr. Christopher MacDonald, Taiwan Panorama, September 1991, Taiwan Panorama (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan), article text
- CC-CEDICT entry 戌狗, CC-CEDICT, the open Chinese–English dictionary, entry 戌狗 (Year 11), via MDBG, MDBG / CC-CEDICT, entry 戌狗
- CC-CEDICT entry 狗, CC-CEDICT, the open Chinese–English dictionary, entry 狗 (dog), via MDBG, MDBG / CC-CEDICT, entry 狗
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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