Earthly Branches are the lower layer of every BaZi (Four Pillars) chart and one of the two great building blocks of the Chinese calendrical system, alongside the Heavenly Stems. Where the stems are visible and yang, the branches carry the hidden, yin, internal structure — the roots beneath the surface, the deeper forces that anchor a person's character and the environment in which events unfold.

The twelve signs

The cycle runs from Rat through Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster and Dog to Pig. Each article takes one branch in the same order: its elemental nature and symbolic meaning, the animal sign it gives to the year and the character that sign carries in Chinese culture, the years it has produced across the sixty-year cycle, and the month, hours and direction it marks.

Hidden stems and interactions

A branch is never only an animal. Each one conceals one, two or three Heavenly Stems, and it is those hidden stems that let a reading say what a pillar is actually made of — why two charts with the same animal sign can behave quite differently. The branches also relate to one another through a fixed vocabulary of combinations, clashes, harms and punishments, which is what makes them as useful in feng shui as in astrology: the same interactions decide which directions support or disturb one another in a given year.

Read together with the Heavenly Stems, these twelve articles complete the alphabet of the Chinese calendar and of every chart built from it.