Horse

The Horse in the cycle of years

The Horse is the seventh animal in the Chinese zodiac, the ordering of twelve signs that names one year after another and then starts again from the beginning. The sequence is fixed and has been transmitted for centuries in calendars, almanacs, and household usage: the Horse follows the Snake and precedes the Goat. Because each sign belongs to a whole year rather than to a month or a season, a Horse year covers the entire span from one lunar new year to the day before the next.

The animal cycle does not run alone. In the traditional calendar each of the twelve animals corresponds to one of the earthly branches, and the branches combine in turn with a series of stems associated with the five elements. Animal and element therefore pair differently from one appearance of a sign to the next, and the two cycles come back into step only after sixty combinations. This longer count is why older records name a year by a stem-and-branch pair rather than by the animal alone, and why the same animal returns with a different elemental partner each time.

The branch the Horse occupies is also linked, in calendrical writing, with the hours around midday and with the height of summer. Beyond the calendar, horses themselves held a plain and practical importance in Chinese history — in transport, in farming, in cavalry, and in the workshops of painters and poets who returned to the animal again and again as a subject.

What the tradition associates with the Horse

In the tradition, the Horse is associated with energy that shows itself in movement: an appetite for open ground, for travel, and for work that keeps going forward. The readings the tradition carries describe the sign as spirited and quick to act, drawn to a task the moment it becomes clear, and more at ease beginning something than circling it.

The tradition also links the Horse with warmth in company. It is described as sociable and outgoing, at home among people, and candid in speech — inclined to say a thing directly rather than by hint. Alongside that sociability the tradition places a marked independence: the sign is read as valuing room to decide for itself, and as working willingly and hard when the direction is its own.

Where the tradition names a difficulty, it names restlessness. The readings hold that the Horse prefers motion to waiting, and that patience for slow, closed-in, repetitive work is something the sign gathers with effort rather than something it begins with. The same accounts treat the sign's brightness and stamina as the other face of that impatience, and tie the Horse to the strength of summer light and to the vigour of the yang half of the traditional pairing.

These are readings the tradition carries, recorded and retold over centuries. They describe the sign, not any person born in its years.

Festivals, naming, and the start of the year

A zodiac year begins at the lunar new year, not at the start of the Gregorian year. The boundary moves, falling in the winter weeks that Gregorian reckoning divides between late January and February. This has a practical consequence worth keeping in mind: a birthday in the first weeks of a Gregorian year often belongs to the sign of the year before, and the Horse claims only those births that fall after the lunar new year has arrived.

The incoming animal is visible everywhere during the new year season. Its image appears on papercuts and door decorations, on printed almanacs, on red envelopes given to children, and on the commemorative postage stamps that many postal administrations issue for the year. Craft traditions — embroidery, clay figures, woodblock prints — take up the animal in its turn, and the Horse arrives in that rotation with its own long history as a subject in painting.

The sign also does quiet work in everyday speech. Naming one's zodiac animal is a common and polite way of indicating roughly when one was born without stating it outright, since the cycle repeats at a known interval. When a person's own animal year comes round again, custom in many families calls for wearing something red — a belt, a cord, an item of clothing — often given by a relative rather than bought for oneself. Households also mark the year with paired scrolls and greetings that name the incoming animal.

Years of the Horse

Each year begins at the lunar new year and ends the day before the next one.