Year of the Pig: Chinese Zodiac Meaning, Years & Traits

If your birthday falls in the first weeks of the year, the Chinese zodiac may file you under a different animal than the one you have always claimed. Someone born on February 10, 2007, for instance, has usually grown up calling themselves a Pig, but in China they would be a Dog.

Chinese New Year did not arrive that year until February 18, and the zodiac runs on the lunar calendar rather than the Gregorian one. Everyone born between January 1 and February 17, 2007 therefore belongs, by the reckoning Chinese speakers actually use, to the previous animal.

That boundary is the first thing worth getting right about the Pig (猪 / 豬, zhū), and the second is that the sign carries a meaning in Chinese most English speakers do not expect. What follows covers the Pig years with verified dates, the rule for borderline birthdays, what the pig has stood for over thousands of years, and what pig words really do in the language today.

01 What years are the Year of the Pig?

Each year also carries a label from the sexagenary cycle of ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches (天干地支, tiāngān dìzhī). The Pig's branch is 亥 (hài), and the stem paired with it supplies the year's element from the five phases (五行, wǔxíng) — the same five that organize traditions from Chinese medicine to feng shui.

Those dates come from the Hong Kong Observatory's calendar conversion tables, which give the stem-branch pair and the animal for every year. There are five kinds of Pig year rather than ten because 亥 is a yin branch and pairs only with yin stems, so any given Pig year returns once every sixty years.

The Pig also comes last of the twelve signs, a position that makes it a handy anchor when you are learning the Chinese zodiac in order. The legends about how it ended up there are worth a look in their own right, and we come back to them below.

02 Am I a Pig if I was born in January or February?

The simplest way to settle this is with the dates in the table above: if your birthday falls on or after the Chinese New Year date for a Pig year and before the following New Year, you are a Pig. Because the zodiac year moves with the lunar calendar, birthdays in late January and February are the only ones that ever need checking.

The question comes up at all because two different boundaries are in circulation. Most people count the zodiac year from the first day of the first lunar month (正月初一, zhēngyuè chūyī), while astrologers casting a birth chart count from the solar term known as the start of spring (立春, lìchūn), which falls on February 4 or 5 almost every year.

Chinese scholarship is openly split on the point. A 2015 China News Service report set a Purple Mountain Observatory researcher counting from Chinese New Year against a Jiangsu Astronomical Society researcher insisting on 立春, and noted along the way that most young parents have never heard of the 立春 method at all.

In practice the choice changes the answer only for people born in the gap between the two dates, and that gap flips direction from one Pig year to the next. The table below shows which weeks are affected in each case.

Someone born on February 10, 2007 is therefore a Dog in ordinary usage and under the national standard, even though a 八字 chart places them in the 丁亥 Pig year. Someone born on January 28, 2031 will have it the other way round: a Pig to everyone they meet, and a Dog in a birth chart for another week.

03 What the pig means in Chinese culture

In English, "pig" tends to work as an insult before it works as an animal. In Chinese culture the first association is abundance, and that link turns out to be older and better grounded than most readers expect.

Pigs were among the earliest animals domesticated in China. Molars found at Cishan shrink to domestic proportions by around 8,000 years before present, and teeth at Jiahu from roughly 9,000 BP show the crowding and enamel defects typical of penned animals on a managed diet.

Closer to CLI's own home, the Zengpiyan cave on the edge of Guilin was occupied from around 10,000 BC and has been argued over on this exact question for decades. Whether its pigs were domesticated has never been settled.

What turns a pig into a symbol of wealth, though, is less that people ate them than where they turn up. Neolithic pig skulls and jade pig-dragons cluster in high-status burials, and archaeologists working on the Hongshan culture have argued that pig ritual helped an elite class form in the first place.

A pig, in other words, was a household's stored surplus — what you had because you had more than you needed. The Smithsonian, introducing its collection for 2031, puts the inherited meaning plainly.

Does 家 really mean "a pig under a roof"?

You will read almost everywhere that the character for home and family (家, jiā) shows a pig 豕 (shǐ) under a roof, and that this proves a home was defined by the livestock inside it. The oracle-bone form really does place a pig inside a structure, and that part is not in dispute — what the pig is doing there is.

The Han dynasty dictionary Shuowen Jiezi defines 家 as a dwelling and treats the pig element as an abbreviated phonetic borrowed from 豭 (jiā, "boar"), which would make it one of the phono-semantic compounds that account for most of the writing system rather than a picture of domestic life. Specialists in Chinese etymology are still arguing about it, so the pig-under-a-roof reading is best treated as a traditional gloss rather than as settled fact.

There is a neater character story close by in any case. In ancient script the branch 亥 and the pig character 豕 were written so much alike that the Shuowen calls them the same graph, and Chinese keeps a set phrase for exactly that kind of copying slip — 鲁鱼亥豕 (lǔ yú hài shǐ).

Why is the pig last in the zodiac?

The legends disagree with one another, which usually points to folklore rather than history. In one version the pig simply arrived last at the gathering called by the Jade Emperor, ruler of heaven in China's older religious traditions; in another it stopped to eat and fell asleep; in a third it was the weakest swimmer.

One further detail is worth knowing, which is that the Japanese and Tibetan zodiacs give twelfth place to the wild boar rather than the domestic pig. The branch is the same in each case, but the animal attached to it shifts as the system crosses borders.

04 Is calling someone a pig an insult in Chinese?

The word on its own is not. Look 猪 up in zdic's mainland entries or Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionaries — or in any of the other online Chinese dictionaries worth keeping bookmarked — and you get a mammal, a zodiac branch, and in older usage a pool of standing water.

No sense meaning dirty, greedy or stupid is listed in those entries at all. Saying "I'm a Pig" (我属猪, wǒ shǔ zhū) therefore carries none of the baggage English speakers tend to brace for.

Where the sharpness lives is in the compounds, and there it is very real indeed. A handful of them are worth recognizing fairly early, if only so that you know what you are hearing.

Two documented episodes belong to recent history rather than to live slang. During the 2019 pork price spike, Chinese media took to calling pigs 二师兄 (èr shīxiōng, "Second Senior Brother") after Zhu Bajie (猪八戒), the pig disciple in Journey to the West.

Zhu Bajie is also the one place where dictionaries do record an insult, since Taiwan's Ministry of Education notes that his name came to be used for calling someone ugly or greedy. The second episode came in 2018, when Peppa Pig (小猪佩奇, Xiǎozhū Pèiqí) was pulled from the video app Douyin after the character became an emblem of the 社会人 (shèhuìrén) subculture.

05 What is the Pig personality in the Chinese zodiac?

In the popular zodiac tradition, people born in Pig years are described as generous, sincere, even-tempered and unusually good company. The same qualities are then turned over to supply the weaknesses: too trusting, too indulgent, and slow to suspect anyone of anything.

It is worth knowing where that list comes from, since it cannot be traced to anything older than modern popular astrology. Read it as what the tradition attributes to the Pig rather than as an inheritance from antiquity, and none of that is a reason not to enjoy it.

The element sub-types deserve the same light touch, although the element assignment itself is genuine enough. The familiar Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water labels come from the heavenly stem, while the older 纳音 (nàyīn) system assigns its own element to each stem-branch pair and disagrees for three of the five Pig years.

The personality profiles attached to each sub-type are another matter, since nobody appears able to source them. They are best enjoyed as decoration rather than as description.

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06 Which signs is the Pig compatible with?

The standard answer pairs the Pig best with the Rabbit, Goat and Tiger, and sets it against the Snake and the Monkey, with a few lists adding another Pig. What most pages leave out is that these pairings are not really opinions at all.

They are outputs of four fixed relationships between the earthly branches, which is why every reference page ends up saying much the same thing. Once you can see the machinery behind them, the lists start to look less like mysticism and more like arithmetic.

That is roughly how the zodiac functions in daily life as well. Asking someone their sign is ordinary small talk, and a polite way of working out their age, since each sign maps onto a twelve-year band.

07 What about lucky numbers and colors?

We have left the lucky numbers, colors and directions out of this guide, because the popular lists do not agree with one another. Set several English-language zodiac pages side by side and the same number turns up as lucky on one and unlucky on the next, often in wording copied almost word for word.

If you want the part of Chinese number belief that is genuinely well documented, the homophones that make some numbers welcome and others awkward are much firmer ground. Our guide to Chinese numerology is built on the sounds of the words themselves.

08 The "golden pig" year that wasn't

In late 2006, Chinese newspapers began describing the coming year as a golden pig year that arrives only once every sixty years, and reported forecasts of 100,000 "golden pig babies" in Beijing and 130,000 in Shanghai. NPR reported maternity wards booked solid, and very little of it held up.

2007 was 丁亥: a Fire Pig year by the stem system, and an Earth Pig year under 纳音. The genuine Metal Pig years are 1911, 1971 and 2031, and Chinese papers were pointing this out before the year had properly begun.

Changzhou Daily ran a piece on January 3, 2007 headlined "The golden pig turns into an earth pig," quoting an expert who noted that stem-branch labels record years and have nothing to do with anyone's fate. The predicted baby boom did not show up in the national statistics either.

Mainland births rose 0.6% in 2007, comfortably inside ordinary year-to-year variation, while Taiwan's fell very slightly. In 2019, an authentic Pig year, births dropped in both.

The zodiac birth-timing effect is real and measurable, but it belongs to the dragon rather than to the pig. Taiwanese births jumped 16.7% in the dragon year of 2012, rising from 196,627 to 229,481.

The serious research points the same way. Chinese children born in dragon years do better at school and at university entrance, but the effect disappears once you account for what their parents expected of them.

That makes it a finding about parental investment becoming self-fulfilling rather than about anything the calendar does to a child. It is worth keeping in mind when reading any zodiac trait list, including the one above.

09 Pigs, pork and African swine fever

The Pig year of 2019 arrived in the middle of a crisis for actual pigs. African swine fever was first confirmed in Asia at a farm in Shenyang in August 2018, and on the Asian Development Bank's 2020 estimate somewhere between a quarter and 55% of China's national herd was lost.

Pork reached a national average of 35.12 yuan per kilo, 57% above pre-outbreak prices, and Chinese commentary at the time duly noted the timing. It was a coincidence rather than an omen.

Pig imagery was also noticeably scaled back in mainland state media around the 2019 new year, with CCTV's nearly four-hour Spring Festival Gala mentioning pigs only once. Reports at the time described this as consideration for Muslim communities in China.

None of which has shifted pork from the center of the table in most of the country, Guilin included. The broth (卤水, lǔshuǐ) that defines Guilin rice noodles (桂林米粉, Guìlín mǐfěn) is built on pork and pig bones.

10 2031: the next Pig year, and what 本命年 means

January 23, 2031 begins 辛亥, a Metal Pig year under both the stem system and 纳音 — one of the few Pig years in which the two agree. It is also the stem-branch that gave the 1911 revolution its Chinese name, the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥革命, Xīnhài Gémìng) that brought the Qing dynasty to an end.

For anyone born in a Pig year, 2031 is a zodiac birth year (本命年, běnmìngnián), the year your own sign comes round once every twelve. Custom holds that it is a year to be careful in, because you are said to offend the year deity Tàisuì (太岁).

The remedy is simply to wear something red: a belt, underwear, or a thread tied to your clothes. How seriously people take it varies a good deal, from real precaution to a fond habit and a welcome excuse for a gift.

11 FAQ

12 Chinese vocabulary for the Year of the Pig

The table below collects the Chinese terms used above, in order of first appearance. If you would rather meet this vocabulary in running text than in a list, CLI's HSK 4 graded reader on the Chinese zodiac animals puts a good deal of it into context.

13 Final thoughts

The Pig is the sign most often explained apologetically in English, and it is the one that needs it least. Get the date right, take the trait lists with the lightness they deserve, and what remains is one of the better stories in the zodiac: thousands of years of an animal that meant a household had more than it needed.

Learn Chinese in China and the zodiac stops being trivia, turning up instead in small talk, in jokes about a friend's 本命年, and in the way people place one another's ages. CLI's teachers in Guilin teach one-on-one, online and in person, and a free trial class is the easiest way to find out whether it suits you.