Jia Zi Pillar (甲子) — Yang Wood over Rat

What the two characters are

甲 Jia — The first stem: a seed breaking through. Jia people grow straight and fast, and are better at starting than at bending.

子 Zi — the Rat, a Water branch covering 23:00 – 01:00. As a branch it is the third of the four layers a chart is read through: the animal name people know is only this one character, with no stem attached.

Jia Zi is the first pillar of the cycle and the one people meet first, which is why it carries more expectation than any other. Yang Wood standing on the Water of Zi is wood floating on a current: nourished at every moment and anchored at none. Read it as high growth potential that needs somewhere to take root, not as a guarantee that it will find one.

How the two meet

Inside a pillar the stem and the branch are not equal partners. The convention is to read them as a relationship: one of them is doing something to the other. Here, the branch generates the stem.

The branch feeds the stem. The support is real and it shows up as a pillar that holds its own without strain — the quality of the stem is available to the chart rather than being spent. Whether that translates into anything lasting still depends on whether the stem has an actual root in the more hidden layers.

The stem has no root in this branch. Nothing hidden below it is made of the same element, so the stem is running on support from elsewhere in the chart or on nothing at all.

What is hidden in the branch

A branch is not one element. Each of the twelve carries up to three stems inside it — the main qi that gives it its name, and one or two lesser ones. Those hidden stems are where most of the actual weight in a chart comes from, and they are read even though nothing of them appears in the four visible characters.

When a practitioner says a pillar is strong or weak, this table is usually the reason — a stem with a hidden ally below it behaves nothing like the same stem sitting on an empty branch.

Where this pillar sits in the sixty

甲子 is number 1 of the sixty combinations. Its nayin — the classical image assigned to it — is 海中金 Gold in the Sea, a Metal image. The Metal images in the nayin table all describe something finished and unbending — buried in the sea, in sand, in a sword's edge, set in a hairpin. What changes between them is only where the finished thing ended up.

As a day pillar, this pair comes round every sixty days. The next six:

As a year pillar, the pair returns only once every sixty years — these are the recent and coming ones:

The day dates are calculated from the same engine that runs the chart calculator. Note that the Chinese day starts at 23:00: a birth late in the evening belongs to the next day pillar, which shifts the whole calculation by one.

Reading a pillar on its own

A single pillar is not a reading. What this page describes is the internal structure of 甲子 — which element is on top, what is underneath it, and whether the support is there. To turn that into something about a person you need the other three pillars and a day master to read them against, because the ten gods that carry the actual meaning are relationships to the day master rather than properties of a pillar.

The other pillars in this set

All of the sixty jiazi →

Common questions