Year of the Monkey
The Monkey is the ninth of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, the animal of the earthly branch 申 shēn. The last Monkey year ran from 8 February 2016 to 27 January 2017; the next, an Earth Monkey, begins on 26 January 2028 and ends on 12 February 2029.
Meaning
The monkey, 猴 hóu in Chinese, is the ninth animal in the cycle of twelve that names the years of the Chinese calendar; the Hong Kong Observatory’s calendar calls 2028, a Wu-shen year, the “year of the Monkey”. Its name sounds like hou, a marquis or peerage, and the National Palace Museum in Taipei explains that a monkey on horseback is a wish for immediate promotion in rank. The best-known monkey in Chinese culture is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of the novel Journey to the West, who appears, Taiwan Panorama reported, on New Year pictures, paper cuts and dough figures as well as in opera, film and comics. Britannica gives the popular reading of character, that people born in the year of the monkey “are said to be curious, mischievous, and clever”, and the Smithsonian lists “agility, cleverness, and curiosity”; the Victoria and Albert Museum notes that reading character from one’s birth animal is a recent development, absent from ancient Chinese texts.
Origin and history
The monkey is the hardest of the animals to find in the oldest lists. On Qin bamboo slips of before 217 BC from Shuihudi in Hubei, the branch 申 shēn is paired with 环 huán, as People’s Weekly quotes the text, a word the editors read as 猨, “ape”. Han slips from Kongjiapo in Suizhou give 申 a “jade stone” (玉石) instead, and Fan Guodong of the Hubei Provincial Museum’s archaeology institute told the Wuhan Evening News in 2015 that no sound-borrowing turns that into a monkey; the Qin slips also have “申，石也”, “shen is stone”. He suggested the stone was the kui, which Confucius in the Guoyu names as the prodigy of trees and rocks: a one-legged creature, called the shanxiao in the south, with a human face and a monkey’s body, which in time became the monkey.
In Wang Chong’s Lunheng of the first century AD the monkey is in place, and Wang Chong uses it against the theory that the animals overcome one another as their elements do. The monkey is metal, he notes; fire overcomes metal, so why does the snake (fire) not eat the monkey? Monkeys are afraid of rats, and the dog is the one that bites monkeys, but water does not overcome metal, and earth does not overcome metal either: “猴何故畏犬？”, “why then does the monkey fear the dog?”
Years of the Monkey
Each Monkey 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1932 | Water | 6 February 1932 | 25 January 1933 |
| 1944 | Wood | 25 January 1944 | 12 February 1945 |
| 1956 | Fire | 12 February 1956 | 30 January 1957 |
| 1968 | Earth | 30 January 1968 | 16 February 1969 |
| 1980 | Metal | 16 February 1980 | 4 February 1981 |
| 1992 | Water | 4 February 1992 | 22 January 1993 |
| 2004 | Wood | 22 January 2004 | 8 February 2005 |
| 2016 | Fire | 8 February 2016 | 27 January 2017 |
| 2028 | Earth | 26 January 2028 | 12 February 2029 |
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.
Sun Wukong in Journey to the West
In Journey to the West, the novel Taiwan Panorama attributes to Wu Cheng’en, the monkey is born from a magic rock on the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, learns seventy-two transformations and a cloud somersault of 108,000 leagues, wrecks the Heavenly Palace, and then protects the monk Xuanzang on his journey to fetch the Buddhist scriptures from India, alongside the pig Zhu Bajie, Pigsy, of the Pig. Readers disagree about him. Taiwan Panorama notes that the uproar in heaven, which gave him his name as a rebel, fills only the first seven of the novel’s hundred chapters; the scholar Hu Shih called the book good humour and delightful entertainment, while Chang Chien-erh of National Taiwan University read it as a story of growing up. In Taiwan over ten temples are dedicated to him as the Great Sage, and parents in Tainan take overactive children to his temple there in the hope that he will help them through their rebellious years.
A monkey on horseback
The National Palace Museum explains its Qing bamboo-root carving of a monkey on a horse as a pun: “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 of the same subject as “May you immediately be elevated to the rank of marquis!”
The monkey in the race and in matchmaking
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 goat, the monkey and the rooster came in together after helping one another across. A Taiwanese rhyme recorded by Taiwan Panorama gives the monkey the line “ninth the monkey, climbing to the treetops”. Matchmakers were less kind. Taiwan Panorama reprinted an old popular print in 1995 that lists signs that should not marry, among them “a pig and a monkey will surely fight”, and fortune tellers held that a Snake should avoid marrying a Tiger, a Monkey or a Pig.
The monkey head from the Old Summer Palace
The bronze monkey head from the zodiac water clock at the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, looted by British and French troops in 1860, was one of the first to come back: CGTN reports that the ox, monkey and tiger heads were returned in 2000. In 2023 the Poly Art Museum’s four heads and the horse head were shown together at the Yuanmingyuan for the first time since 1860.
Read next
- Next in Chinese zodiacYear of the RoosterThe Rooster is the tenth of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, the animal of the earthly branch 酉 yǒu. The last Rooster year ran from 28 January 2017 to 15 February 2018; the next, an Earth Rooster, begins on 13 February 2029 and ends on 2 February 2030.
- The same shape in Taíno symbolsAtabey (the Woman of Caguana)Atabey is the mother of the Taíno supreme being in the account Ramón Pané wrote in the 1490s, a mother with five names. Many Taíno today see her in La Mujer de Caguana, a frog-legged woman carved on a stone at the Caguana ceremonial park in Puerto Rico.
See also
Year of the Goat, Year of the Horse, Year of the Pig, Year of the Rat, Year of the Ox, Year of the Tiger.
Sources
- Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2028, 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, section 夔变猴 老羊变狗
- Chinese zodiac, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Chinese zodiac” (Frannie Comstock and the Britannica editors), Encyclopaedia Britannica, History and legend
- Year of the Monkey, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Year of the Monkey” (Britannica editors), Encyclopaedia Britannica, article text
- 2028: Year of the Monkey, Smithsonian Institution, Spotlight, Smithsonian Institution, spotlight text
- 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 Immediate Granting of a Peerage
- Monkey riding a horse, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Avery Brundage Collection, on Google Arts & Culture, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, object description
- A historic reunion of five Yuanmingyuan’s bronze zodiac animal heads, CGTN, 21 October 2023, CGTN, article text
- Old Monkey’s Cares and Concerns, Theresa Wang, tr. Peter Eberly, Taiwan Panorama, February 1987, Taiwan Panorama (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan), article text
- Every Hog Has His Day: The Year of the Pig, Shen Chien, tr. Brent Heinrich, Taiwan Panorama, January 1995, 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 申猴, CC-CEDICT, the open Chinese–English dictionary, entry 申猴 (Year 9), via MDBG, MDBG / CC-CEDICT, entry 申猴
- CC-CEDICT entry 猴, CC-CEDICT, the open Chinese–English dictionary, entry 猴 (monkey), via MDBG, MDBG / CC-CEDICT, entry 猴
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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