Yi Chou Pillar (乙丑) — Yin Wood over Ox

What the two characters are

乙 Yi — The second stem: the vine. Yi people are flexible, persuasive and grow around obstacles rather than through them.

丑 Chou — the Ox, a Earth branch covering 01:00 – 03:00. 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.

Yi Chou pairs the vine with the winter storehouse. Yin Wood on Chou has no root in the branch — what Chou holds is Earth, Water and Metal, so the stem is fed only indirectly, by the Gui Water buried there, and is worked on by the Xin Metal beside it. It is the quietest of the first twelve and generally the most durable: growth that survives a bad season because it learned early not to expect a generous 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 stem controls the branch.

The stem is in charge of the branch. The pillar reads as a position of handling: the stem is working on something that will not move unless it is worked on. Effort here produces a result the chart can actually keep, which is why classical readings treat this arrangement as one of the more workable ones.

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

乙丑 is number 2 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 乙丑 — 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