Year of the Pig
The 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.
Meaning
The pig, 猪 (豬) zhū in Chinese (豕 shǐ in older texts), closes the cycle of twelve animals that names the years of the Chinese calendar; the Hong Kong Observatory’s calendar calls 2031, a Xin-hai year, the “year of the Pig”. CC-CEDICT glosses the branch-and-animal pair 亥猪 as the “year of the Boar”, and the Congressional Research Service writes “pig (or boar)”. Taiwan Panorama wrote in 1991 that the pig means wealth among the signs, and in 1995 that “a full stock of poultry and pigs” has always been the great dream of the Chinese commoner; the pig is also the most loved clown of Chinese literature, Zhu Bajie of Journey to the West. A Taiwanese rhyme is blunter: “twelfth the pig, destined for the chopper.” People born in Pig years are popularly said to love sleeping, Taiwan Panorama reports; reading character from one’s birth animal is a recent development, the Victoria and Albert Museum notes, absent from ancient Chinese texts.
Origin and history
The pig is the one animal of the second half of the cycle already in its modern place in the oldest surviving list. On Qin bamboo slips of before 217 BC from Shuihudi in Hubei, “亥，豕也”, “hai is the pig”, People’s Weekly quotes the text, and Fan Guodong of the Hubei Provincial Museum’s archaeology institute told the Wuhan Evening News in 2015 that the pig also matches today’s list on the Han slips from Kongjiapo.
In Wang Chong’s Lunheng of the first century AD, “亥水也，其禽豕也”, “hai is water; its creature is the pig.” The theorists Wang Chong was arguing with said that because water overcomes fire, the pig eats the snake (fire); he answered that earth overcomes water, so why do the ox and the goat (earth) not kill the pig?
Years of the Pig
Each Pig 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1935 | Wood | 4 February 1935 | 23 January 1936 |
| 1947 | Fire | 22 January 1947 | 9 February 1948 |
| 1959 | Earth | 8 February 1959 | 27 January 1960 |
| 1971 | Metal | 27 January 1971 | 14 February 1972 |
| 1983 | Water | 13 February 1983 | 1 February 1984 |
| 1995 | Wood | 31 January 1995 | 18 February 1996 |
| 2007 | Fire | 18 February 2007 | 6 February 2008 |
| 2019 | Earth | 5 February 2019 | 24 January 2020 |
| 2031 | Metal | 23 January 2031 | 10 February 2032 |
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.
Pig or boar?
Japan’s zodiac has a wild boar where China’s has a pig, Britannica notes. The character is the same: 猪 means “hog; pig; swine” in Chinese, according to CC-CEDICT, and “wild boar; wild pig” in Japanese, according to the Japanese dictionary JMdict. Other neighbours changed the animal. Britannica records an elephant for the pig in some parts of Thailand, and the Victoria and Albert Museum says the Turkic peoples of Central Asia replaced the pig with the elephant. Vietnam keeps the pig and differs from China in the buffalo, the cat and the goat, the Congressional Research Service notes.
Last 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 pig came last, after stopping to eat and rest along the way, behind the dog.
Zhu Bajie
The pig of Journey to the West is Zhu Bajie, Pigsy, who travels with the Monkey King to fetch the Buddhist scriptures. His name Bajie, “eight prohibitions”, refers to the eight vices Buddhists forbid, Taiwan Panorama explains, and is sarcastic: he is greedy, lustful, gluttonous and lazy, guilty of all eight, and Taiwan Panorama finds him the pilgrim closest to human nature.
A Ming emperor and the pig
The Ming emperor Zhengde (reigned 1505–1521) once forbade the keeping of pigs, Taiwan Panorama relates, because he was born in a Pig year and his surname, Zhu, sounds like the word for pig. Matchmakers had their own rules: an old popular print lists “a pig and a monkey will surely fight” among the signs that should not marry.
The pig head from the Old Summer Palace
The bronze pig head from the zodiac water clock at the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, looted by British and French troops in 1860, was returned in 2003, CGTN reports; the National Museum of China notes that the Macao businessman Stanley Ho gave it back to the Yuanmingyuan, sixteen years before he donated the horse head. In 2023 it was shown at the Yuanmingyuan with the ox, tiger, monkey and horse heads. The National Palace Museum in Taipei has a Qing painting of hogs by Wang Su, with three piglets crossing a river in the distance.
Read next
- Next in Chinese zodiacFive elements (wu xing)Wood, fire, earth, metal and water: the five phases (五行 wǔxíng) of Chinese thought, which describe how things change rather than what they are made of. In the Chinese calendar each year takes the element of its heavenly stem, and the element follows the year’s last digit: years ending in 6 and 7, such as 2026 and 2027, are Fire years.
- The same shape in Animal symbolismCat symbolismAncient Egyptians held the cat sacred to the goddess Bast; in Norse myth two cats draw the goddess Freyja's car; in the British witch lore John Brand collected, the cat was the witch's familiar. The black cat crossing your path is unlucky in American and English superstition, and lucky in Scotland and Japan.
See also
Year of the Rat, Year of the Dog, Year of the Monkey, Year of the Ox, Year of the Tiger, Year of the Rabbit.
Sources
- Gregorian–Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2031, 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; other variations
- Lunar New Year: Fact Sheet, Congressional Research Service, R46674, updated 16 January 2026, Congressional Research Service (Library of Congress), pp. 1–2
- 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 New Tenants: the Tiger and Pig
- A historic reunion of five Yuanmingyuan’s bronze zodiac animal heads, CGTN, 21 October 2023, CGTN, article text
- Chinese zodiac statue heads home, National Museum of China, news, 2 December 2019 (from China Daily), National Museum of China, 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), article text and captions
- Old Monkey’s Cares and Concerns, Theresa Wang, tr. Peter Eberly, Taiwan Panorama, February 1987, Taiwan Panorama (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan), article text
- The Dog’s Tale, Chuang Po-he, tr. Robert Taylor, Taiwan Panorama, January 1994, Taiwan Panorama (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan), section Zodiac animal taboos
- 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 亥猪, CC-CEDICT, the open Chinese–English dictionary, entry 亥猪 (Year 12), via MDBG, MDBG / CC-CEDICT, entry 亥猪
- CC-CEDICT entry 猪, CC-CEDICT, the open Chinese–English dictionary, entry 猪 (pig), via MDBG, MDBG / CC-CEDICT, entry 猪
- JMdict entry 猪 (inoshishi), JMdict Japanese–English dictionary, entry 猪, via Jisho.org, Jisho.org / JMdict (EDRDG), entry 猪
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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