Chinese Zodiac Years 2000–2009 — Animals, Stems and Elements

Every year in this decade

Stem elements across this decade

Every decade contains one of each of the ten stems, so the element counts below are structural rather than distinctive — each of the five elements appears exactly twice across any complete ten-year span.

What this decade shares

This is the most structurally interesting of the ten decades on this page. Chen and Chou are both water vaults: Chen stores Gui water as its leftover qi and Chou stores Gui water as its middle qi. A decade that opens on one and closes on the other is bounded at both ends by storehouses of the same element — which does not happen anywhere else in this 1950–2043 range.

The animal span is Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig, Rat, Ox. The missing pair is the Tiger and the Rabbit — both wood branches. So the 2000s contain neither of the two animals associated with spring.

It is also worth noting that the 2000s begin on a year whose last digit is zero, and every zero year in the sixty-year cycle carries a Geng (Yang Metal) stem. That is a fixed property of the sequence rather than a pattern in the decade, and it is the kind of thing the big year tables make hard to see.

For anyone born 2000–2009, the Dragon and Snake distinction is often confused because the popular boundary for the year is Chinese New Year while BaZi uses Lichun. Births in January and early February in these years may belong to the previous animal — the table below uses the standard year attribution.

Questions about 2000–2009

Other decades

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