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

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

Chinese New Year didn't arrive that year until February 18. Because the zodiac follows the lunar calendar, everyone born between January 1 and February 17, 2007 belongs to the previous animal by the reckoning Chinese speakers actually use.

That boundary is the first thing to get right about the Pig (猪 / 豬, zhū). The second is what the sign means in Chinese. For thousands of years a pig meant plenty, and the insults are confined to a handful of compound words.

01 What years are the Year of the Pig?

Pig years come round every twelve years: 1911, 1923, 1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007 and 2019, and the next is 2031. 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 gives the year its element from the five phases (五行, wǔxíng), the same five used in Chinese medicine and 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 only five kinds of Pig year because 亥 is a yin branch that pairs only with yin stems. Each kind comes back once every sixty years.

The Pig also comes last of the twelve signs, which makes it a handy anchor when you learn the Chinese zodiac in order. We come back to the legends about how it ended up there further down.

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

Check your birthday against the table above. If it falls on or after the Chinese New Year date for a Pig year and before the next New Year, you are a Pig. Because the zodiac year moves with the lunar calendar, only birthdays in late January and February ever need checking.

The question comes up because two different boundaries are in use. 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 called the start of spring (立春, lìchūn), which falls on February 4 or 5 almost every year.

Before the 2017 standard below, Chinese experts were split on it. A 2015 China News Service report set a Purple Mountain Observatory researcher, who counts from Chinese New Year, against a Jiangsu Astronomical Society researcher who insists on 立春, and noted that most young parents have never heard of the 立春 method.

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

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. A baby 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" is often an insult first and an animal second. Chinese culture associates the pig with plenty first, and the archaeology backs that up.

Pigs were among the first animals domesticated in China. Molars found at Cishan shrink to domestic size by around 8,000 years ago, and Jiahu teeth roughly 9,000 years old show the crowding and enamel defects you see in penned animals on a managed diet.

Closer to our school, the Zengpiyan cave on the edge of Guilin was occupied from around 10,000 BC, and archaeologists have argued for decades about whether its pigs were domesticated. Nobody has settled it.

Eating pigs is only part of why they came to mean wealth; the rest is 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, the thing you had because you had more than you needed. Introducing its collection for 2031, the Smithsonian puts the meaning plainly.

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

You'll 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. Nobody disputes that the oracle-bone form puts a pig inside a structure; the argument is about what the pig is doing there.

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 make up most of the writing system, with the pig there for its sound. Specialists in Chinese etymology still argue about it. Until they settle it, treat the pig-under-a-roof reading as a traditional explanation.

A neater character story sits close by. In ancient script the branch 亥 and the pig character 豕 looked so alike that the Shuowen calls them the same graph, and Chinese has a set phrase for 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 is usually a sign of folklore. One version has the pig simply turn up last to 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 on the way, and in another it was the weakest swimmer.

Japan's zodiac has the wild boar (inoshishi) as its twelfth animal. The branch is the same; only the animal changed when the system crossed the sea.

04 Is calling someone a pig an insult in Chinese?

No, the word by itself is not an insult. Look 猪 up in zdic's mainland entries, Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionaries or any of the other online Chinese dictionaries worth bookmarking, and you get a mammal and a zodiac branch, plus, in older usage, a pool of standing water.

None of those entries lists a meaning like stupid or greedy, so saying "I'm a Pig" (我属猪, wǒ shǔ zhū) carries none of the baggage English speakers brace for.

The compounds can be harsh, though. It helps to recognize a few of them early, if only so you know what you're hearing.

Two pig episodes from recent years made the news. During the 2019 pork price spike, Chinese media started 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 a dictionary does record an insult: Taiwan's Ministry of Education notes that his name came to be used for someone ugly or greedy. The second episode was in 2018, when Peppa Pig (小猪佩奇, Xiǎozhū Pèiqí) was pulled from the video app Douyin after the character became a badge of the 社会人 (shèhuìrén) subculture.

05 What is the Pig personality in the Chinese zodiac?

Popular zodiac lore says people born in Pig years are generous, sincere, even-tempered and good company. The weaknesses are the same qualities turned over: Pigs trust too easily, indulge themselves too much and are slow to suspect anyone of anything.

As far as anyone can trace it, that list comes from modern popular astrology and nothing older. There's no harm in enjoying it.

Treat the element sub-types the same way, although the elements themselves are real. The familiar labels (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water) come from the heavenly stem, while the older 纳音 (nàyīn) system gives each stem-branch pair its own element and disagrees for three of the five Pig years.

As for the personality profiles attached to each sub-type, nobody seems able to source them. Enjoy them as decoration.

One person who wrote to our admissions team, hoping to study the zodiac and numerology, found the Chinese signs "much more interesting than the western astrology signs." Mira, our Admissions Manager, told them we don't offer a standalone zodiac course; culture and customs come up as part of our one-on-one language lessons.

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06 Which signs is the Pig compatible with?

The standard answer pairs the Pig best with the Rabbit and Goat, and with the Tiger, and sets it against the Snake and the Monkey, with a few lists adding another Pig. Most pages don't say where these pairings come from.

They follow from five fixed relationships between the earthly branches, which is why every reference page ends up saying much the same thing.

In daily life the zodiac does a simpler job. Asking someone their sign is ordinary small talk and a polite way to work 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 contradict each other. Put a few English-language zodiac pages side by side and the same number is lucky on one and unlucky on the next, often in wording copied almost word for word.

What is well documented is the homophones: some numbers sound like lucky words and others like unlucky ones. Our guide to Chinese numerology is built on those sound-alikes.

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. 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 real Metal Pig years are 1911, 1971 and 2031, and Chinese papers were saying so 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, the next Pig year, births fell in both.

The zodiac effect on births that does show up in the data belongs to the dragon. Taiwanese births jumped 16.7% in the dragon year of 2012, from 196,627 to 229,481.

Research on those children 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.

So the effect comes from parents' expectations fulfilling themselves. Keep that in mind when you read 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 commentators at the time did notice the timing. It was a coincidence.

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

None of this moved 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, which makes it one of the few Pig years where 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 ended the Qing dynasty.

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 says it is a year to be careful, because you are said to offend the year deity Tàisuì (太岁).

The remedy is to wear something red: red underwear or a belt, or simply a red thread tied to your clothes. Some people take it seriously. For others it's a fond habit, and a good excuse to give someone a present.

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'd rather read these words in a story 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

English-language pages tend to apologize for the Pig, and it needs that less than any other sign. Once the date is right and the trait lists are taken lightly, what's left is a good story: for thousands of years a pig meant a household had more than it needed.

Learn Chinese in China and the zodiac comes up all the time: in small talk, in jokes about a friend's 本命年 and in the way people work out each other's ages. Our teachers in Guilin teach one-on-one lessons online and in person, and a free trial class is the easiest way to find out whether it suits you.

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