1996

1996 carries the identity Bing-Zi in the Chinese sexagenary calendar, the Fire Rat year, its start set by which lunar new year falls inside this Gregorian year rather than by the Gregorian date itself. The system runs two cycles at once: ten heavenly stems, each stem carrying one of five elements across a paired Yang year and Yin year, and twelve earthly branches, each branch carrying one of the familiar zodiac animals. The two cycles advance together, one stem and one branch each year, and because ten and twelve share a lowest common multiple of sixty, the full pairing of stem, branch and element returns only once every sixty years rather than every twelve. This particular pairing, Bing-Zi, last named a year in 1936 and will not do so again until 2056.

The sixty term cycle is older than its zodiac branches alone: it was used to count days as well as years in the earliest Chinese calendars, and its year form still sets the date of the Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean lunar new year, underlies Bazi ("four pillars") fortune telling, which reads a person's stem and branch at birth, month, day and hour together, and paces the lunar timing of some ancestor veneration and temple rites that do not follow the solar calendar.

In Chinese folk astrology a year is read first through its animal and then adjusted by its element. In the story behind the cycle's order, the rat won the Jade Emperor's race by riding across the river on the ox's back and leaping off first at the finish. Rat years are read as favorable for starting new ventures, the animal standing for resourcefulness, the hours just before dawn, and the direction north. The element modifies that base reading: in the five phase (Wu Xing) system Fire governs the south, the color red, the season of summer and the virtue of propriety. A Fire year is traditionally read as active and transformative, quick to expand and quick to burn out; Fire is held to feed Earth and to be held in check by Water.

Put together, 1996 reads in the folk tradition as a Rat year with a Fire cast, Fire's heat tempering the animal's own temperament rather than replacing it. The same twelve animal cycle, adapted with local variation, also orders the traditional calendars of Vietnam, where the rabbit is usually read as a cat, and of Japan, where the pig is usually read as a boar; the underlying stem and element layer that gives 1996 its Fire cast specifically is a Chinese addition that these neighboring traditions do not all keep in the same form. Older reckonings also put the same twelve branches to work outside the calendar of years: the same order once named the twelve double hours of the day and the twelve compass points, so Rat marks a direction and a stretch of the clock in those older systems as well as this year.