Year of the Goat

Is it the year of the goat, the sheep or the ram?

All three are correct English for one Chinese word. CC-CEDICT, the open Chinese–English dictionary, glosses 羊 yáng as “sheep; goat” and the branch-and-animal pair 未羊 as the “year of the Ram”. Colin Mackerras of Griffith University explains that Chinese can be specific when it needs to be: a goat is a shanyang, a “mountain yang”, and a sheep is sometimes a mianyang, a “cotton yang”, while yang alone can stretch to other horned animals like the gazelle. He counts “sheep”, “ram” and “goat” all correct and prefers “sheep”; his Griffith colleague David Schak argued for goat or ram, since goats are far more common in China than sheep. Victor Mair, who meets the same problem in archaeology, calls the animal an “ovicaprid” unless there is firm evidence of which it was.

Institutions split the same way. The Met’s catalogue says ram; Britannica and the Victoria and Albert Museum say sheep; the Smithsonian writes “Goat (or Ram)”; the Hong Kong Observatory’s calendar says Goat. The countries that borrowed the zodiac had to choose. Japanese translates the animal as hitsuji, “sheep”, and not yagi, “goat”, Mackerras notes, while Vietnam took the opposite path, and both the Congressional Research Service and Britannica list the goat in place of the sheep in the Vietnamese zodiac.

Years of the Goat

Each Goat 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.

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. 2027 is a Fire Goat year, the year after the Fire Horse.

The goat in the race

Encyclopaedia Britannica retells the popular legend of a race, called by the Jade Emperor in most tellings and by the Buddha in others, in which the first twelve animals across a river won places in the calendar in the order they finished. The goat followed the horse, and Britannica’s account has the sheep, the monkey and the rooster coming next after helping one another across the river. A Taiwanese rhyme recorded by Taiwan Panorama gives the animal the line “eighth the sheep, eating on grassy knolls”.

Sayings, taboos and an empress

Taiwan Panorama recorded in 1991 the old matchmakers’ sayings about the sign: a Goat should not marry a Tiger unless the families want to see “a sheep in the tiger’s mouth”, and “two sheep, short lives”. The same article quoted the farmers’ almanac for that Goat year, which warned people born under the Goat that “Jupiter is dominant, there is trouble in store”, to be met with offerings to Jupiter. Britannica describes the wider belief: the return of one’s birth animal, ben ming nian, is thought unlucky, and people in that year wear red or an amulet, or pray to Tai Sui, the deity of the year. The Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), born in a Goat year, once banned opera singers from the line “when the sheep goes into the tiger’s mouth it won’t come out again”, Taiwan Panorama writes.

Goats in Chinese art

Painters used sheep in numbers that carried a meaning. Three sheep picture the upsurge of yang at the start of spring, Taiwan Panorama explains, citing the Classic of Changes, and nine sheep the eighty-one cold days after the winter solstice, nine times nine, driven off by the sun. The National Palace Museum’s Auspicious Beginning, by the Song painter Su Hanchen, is a three-goats painting probably made for the court to welcome spring. The bronze goat head from the zodiac water clock at the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, looted in 1860, is still missing, CGTN reported in 2023, along with the snake, rooster and dog.