Year of the Dragon
The Dragon is the fifth of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, the animal of the earthly branch chen, and the only one that is not a real animal. The most recent Year of the Dragon ran from 10 February 2024 to 28 January 2025; the next begins on 28 January 2036.
Meaning
The Dragon (龍 lóng, 龙 in simplified characters) stands for the fifth earthly branch, 辰 chén, which names the hour from 7 to 9 in the morning in the Hong Kong Observatory’s tables. It is the only mythical creature among the twelve, the Library of Congress notes, and dragons and people born in dragon years are said to be powerful and lucky. The Chinese dragon is not the dragon of European legend. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes it as a beneficent creature that stands for yang, the principle of heaven, activity and maleness, and from ancient times it was the emblem of the imperial family; Chinese dragons are usually wingless, though they are powers of the air. The cycle is used across East and Southeast Asia and in the diaspora; in Thailand a naga, a serpent being, takes the dragon’s place.
Origin and history
The dragon is the one animal missing from the oldest list. The chapter on thieves in the Qin day book (Rishu) from Shuihudi in Hubei, buried in 217 BC, names an animal for each branch except chen, the Wuhan University historian Yan Changgui writes from the critical edition of the Qin slips, and the Qin day book from Fangmatan in Gansu leaves chen without one as well. Yan suggests that chen was paired with the dragon, and the dragon left out because it belonged to the Son of Heaven. Some popular accounts print the Shuihudi list with “辰，龙也” (chen is the dragon), as the People’s Weekly did in 2020; Yan’s reading of the slips has no such entry.
The first text to give the dragon its branch is Wang Chong’s Lunheng, of the 1st century AD. His chapter on how creatures overcome one another names eleven of the animals, and his chapter on poison adds the twelfth: “辰為龍，巳為蛇”, chen is the dragon and si the snake, both in the south-east. Wang Chong’s dragon is dangerous: “The dragon is poisonous, and the snake venomous,” runs Alfred Forke’s translation, and the dragon has scales that grow the wrong way. He also names the Blue Dragon, the constellation of the East, one of the four animals of the sky with the White Tiger of the West.
Years of the Dragon
| Year | Element | Begins | Ends |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1928 | Earth | 23 January 1928 | 9 February 1929 |
| 1940 | Metal | 8 February 1940 | 26 January 1941 |
| 1952 | Water | 27 January 1952 | 13 February 1953 |
| 1964 | Wood | 13 February 1964 | 1 February 1965 |
| 1976 | Fire | 31 January 1976 | 17 February 1977 |
| 1988 | Earth | 17 February 1988 | 5 February 1989 |
| 2000 | Metal | 5 February 2000 | 23 January 2001 |
| 2012 | Water | 23 January 2012 | 9 February 2013 |
| 2024 | Wood | 10 February 2024 | 28 January 2025 |
Each year runs from one Lunar New Year to the day before the next, as the Hong Kong Observatory’s conversion tables give them; the next Year of the Dragon begins on 28 January 2036. The element comes from the year’s heavenly stem, so it changes with the last digit of the year: Wood for years ending in 4 and 5, Fire for 6 and 7, Earth for 8 and 9, Metal for 0 and 1, and Water for 2 and 3 (the five elements). Someone born in January or early February before that year’s Lunar New Year belongs to the previous animal: a child born on 1 February 2024 was born in the Year of the Rabbit, because the Year of the Dragon began on 10 February. Some fortune-tellers count the change from the solar term Spring Commences (lichun, about 4 February) instead; the Observatory, and China’s national calendar standard of 2017, use the Lunar New Year.
The Chinese dragon and the Western dragon
The two share a name in English and little else. The English word comes from the Greek drakōn, which meant any large serpent, and Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the dragon of medieval Europe as winged, with a barbed tail, and breathing fire. In Christian art it became a symbol of sin and paganism, shown beneath the heels of saints. The Chinese dragon, Britannica writes, kept its prestige and is beneficent. Ming Wilson of the Victoria and Albert Museum puts it in one line: “The Chinese dragon is an auspicious animal, not one that breathes fire.” Chinese and Japanese dragons are usually wingless, and the Japanese dragon (ryū or tatsu) can change its size at will, even to invisibility. The Chester Beatty Library describes the dragons on a Qing emperor’s robe chasing flaming pearls among rain-bringing clouds over mountains and waves. Europe’s dragons took other forms again: Norse warriors carved dragons’ heads on the prows of their ships.
The emperor’s five claws
Under the Qing dynasty the five-clawed dragon, the long, was reserved for the emperor and his immediate family, the Chester Beatty Library explains. The Metropolitan Museum of Art adds that only robes woven for the emperor, his consorts and the crown prince were called dragon robes (longpao) and carried five-clawed dragons. Wilson reads the dragons on the emperor’s robes as an indirect claim that the emperor, too, would bring good fortune to the country. Britannica notes that a dragon was on the Chinese flag until the founding of the republic.
The dragon-year baby boom
Parents in some Chinese communities time births for dragon years. Paul Yip and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong found short rises in births in Hong Kong in the dragon years 1988 and 2000, which they put down to birth timing that changed little in the long run. In Singapore, Sumit Agarwal and colleagues at the National University of Singapore found the same practice among the Chinese majority only, and that the larger dragon cohorts went on to earn lower incomes and were less likely to win places at the national universities, an effect they put down to the size of the cohort.
Fifth in the race
In the race told as the origin of the order, Encyclopaedia Britannica records, the dragon could fly and should have won easily, but in some versions it turned aside to save villagers from a fire and came fifth.
Read next
- Next in Chinese zodiacYear of the SnakeThe Snake is the sixth of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, the animal of the earthly branch si. The most recent Year of the Snake ran from 29 January 2025 to 16 February 2026; the next begins on 15 February 2037.
- Britannica: the Chinese dragon stands for yang, the principle of heaven, in the yinyang of Chinese cosmologyYin yang (taijitu)A circle divided into a dark and a light half that curl into each other, each holding a dot of the other colour. It pictures yin and yang, the two complementary forces of Chinese thought, and in Daoism the taiji, the “great ultimate” from which they come.
See also
Year of the Rabbit, Japanese dragon (ryū), Chinese dragon (long), Dragons across cultures, Dragon-head prow, Year of the Rat.
Sources
- Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2024 (Hong Kong Observatory), Hong Kong Observatory, Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2024, yearly text file, Hong Kong Observatory, yearly tables T1924e.txt to T2025e.txt, all checked: the date marked “1st Lunar Month” in each year of the Dragon and in the following year; title line of this file; the Lunar New Year date in this file
- Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2036 (Hong Kong Observatory), Hong Kong Observatory, Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2036, yearly text file, Hong Kong Observatory, title line and the date marked “1st Lunar Month” (the next Year of the Dragon)
- Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches (Hong Kong Observatory), Hong Kong Observatory, “Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches”, Calendar pages, Hong Kong Observatory, opening paragraph; Table 3 (the 12 shichen); Table 4 (stems of the months)
- What year is it today? (Hui Tai-wai, Hong Kong Observatory), Hui Tai-wai, “What year is it today?”, Hong Kong Observatory educational resources, April 2018, Hong Kong Observatory, paragraphs 4 and 6
- Huainanzi, Tianwen xun 天文訓 (Chinese Wikisource), Huainanzi 淮南子, chapter 3 “天文訓” (Celestial Patterns), 2nd century BC; Chinese text on Wikisource, Wikisource (Chinese), the passage pairing stems and branches with the five elements
- Celebrating Lunar New Year with the Library of Congress’s Collections (Dianne Choie), Dianne Choie, “Celebrating Lunar New Year with the Library of Congress’s Collections”, 4 Corners of the World blog, Library of Congress, February 2024, Library of Congress, “What’s Special About 2024’s Lunar New Year?”
- Dragon (Encyclopaedia Britannica), The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “dragon”, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Internet Archive copy, 4 September 2026), Encyclopaedia Britannica, article text
- The 12 zodiac animals at the V&A (Ming Wilson), Ming Wilson, “The 12 zodiac animals at the V&A”, V&A Blog (Imperial Chinese Robes from the Forbidden City), 1 February 2011, Victoria and Albert Museum, DRAGON
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- 中国传统生肖文化探源 (Yan Changgui, People’s Tribune), Yan Changgui 晏昌贵 (School of History, Wuhan University), “中国传统生肖文化探源” (The origins of the traditional Chinese zodiac), 人民论坛 People’s Tribune, 16 October 2025, 人民论坛 People’s Tribune, “十二生肖溯源”
- 藏在博物馆里的鼠 (People’s Weekly), “藏在博物馆里的鼠” (Rats in the museum), 人民周刊 People’s Weekly, 4 March 2020, People’s Daily (人民网), paragraph 2
- Lunheng, chapter 66, Yan du 言毒 (Wang Chong, Chinese Wikisource), Wang Chong 王充, Lunheng 論衡, chapter 66 “言毒” (On Poison), 1st century AD; Chinese text on Wikisource, Wikisource (Chinese), Yan du
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- The influence of the Chinese zodiac on fertility in Hong Kong SAR (Yip, Lee and Cheung, 2002), Paul S. F. Yip, Joseph Lee and Y. B. Cheung, “The influence of the Chinese zodiac on fertility in Hong Kong SAR”, Social Science & Medicine 55 (10), 2002, pp. 1803–12; PubMed abstract (Internet Archive copy, 16 April 2024), PubMed (US National Library of Medicine), abstract
- Fortunes of Dragons: Cohort size effects on life outcomes (Agarwal et al., 2021), Sumit Agarwal, Wenlan Qian, Tien Foo Sing and Poh Lin Tan, “Fortunes of Dragons: Cohort size effects on life outcomes”, Population Studies 75 (2), 2021, pp. 191–207; PubMed abstract (Internet Archive copy, 31 January 2025), PubMed (US National Library of Medicine), abstract
- 十二生肖起源可推至战国 (Fan Guodong, Chinanews / Wuhan Evening News), “十二生肖起源可推至战国 鼠身兼阴阳居首位”, interview with Fan Guodong 凡国栋, Wuhan Evening News 武汉晚报, reprinted by China News Service, 15 February 2015, China News Service (chinanews.com), interview text
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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