Year of the Horse

Years of the Horse

Each Horse 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. 2026 and 1966 are Fire Horse years, with a history of their own in Japan: see Fire Horse.

The horse 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 snake came in just ahead of the horse: in some accounts it startled the horse at the finish, in others it hid in or wrapped itself round one of the horse’s hooves while they forded the river and slipped ahead at the last moment. Behind the horse came the goat. A Taiwanese rhyme recorded by Taiwan Panorama gives each animal a line, and the horse’s is “seventh the horse, galloping to barracks”.

Vietnam keeps the horse; its zodiac differs from China’s in the buffalo, the cat and the goat, according to the Congressional Research Service. In Japan the cycle moved to the solar calendar, Britannica notes, rather than the lunar one.

A monkey on horseback

Paired with a monkey, the horse makes a pun. The National Palace Museum in Taipei explains its bamboo-root carving of a monkey on a horse as a wish for immediate promotion: “on horseback” (ma shang) sounds like “immediately”, and the monkey (hou) like a peerage (hou). The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco reads its jade monkey riding a horse the same way, as “May you immediately be elevated to the rank of marquis!”

The horse head from the Old Summer Palace

Twelve bronze animal heads once formed a zodiac water clock at the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, built for the Qianlong emperor; Xinhua reports that the horse head was designed by the Italian artist Giuseppe Castiglione and made by court craftsmen. Anglo-French troops looted the palace in 1860. The horse head reappeared at a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong in 2007; the Macao businessman Stanley Ho negotiated with the seller and paid HK$69.1 million for it, and in November 2019 he gave it to China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration, the National Museum of China reported. It went back to the Yuanmingyuan, the first of the heads to return to its original site.

Horses in Chinese art

Horses only became a subject of Chinese painting in their own right under the Tang dynasty (618–907), the National Museum of Asian Art notes; the Met holds Han Gan’s handscroll Night-Shining White, of about 750. In the Tang the horse was an emblem of imperial power, painted by court artists and modelled in glazed pottery for tombs. The Qing court painter Giuseppe Castiglione and the twentieth-century painter Xu Beihong both painted an “Eight Horses”, and the National Palace Museum keeps a court painting of eight horses sent to the Jiaqing emperor from Xinjiang, each painted at his order. For the 2026 Horse year the Met showed horses from its collection in ceramics, glass, jade, metal and woodblock prints.

In one’s own animal year

The return of one’s birth animal every twelve years, ben ming nian, is thought unlucky rather than a cause for celebration, Britannica records; people in their own animal year are said to be in conflict with Tai Sui, the deity guarding that year, and some pray to Tai Sui, wear red or wear an amulet of the winged lion pixiu. In 2026 that is everyone born in a Horse year.