Chinese Zodiac Years 2010–2019 — 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

The opening branch is Yin and the closing branch is Hai, which is the same span as the 1950s. This is not a coincidence: sixty years is a complete cycle, so any two decades sixty years apart have identical stem and branch sequences. Comparing the two tables side by side is the clearest demonstration of how the system works.

The 2010s omit the Rat and the Ox, exactly as the 1950s do. The implication is worth stating plainly: a 2011 birth and a 1951 birth share a year pillar in every structural sense — same stem, same branch, same element, same hidden stems. Everything that differs between them comes from the month, day and hour pillars.

The six-harmony pairing between the two ends of the span — Yin and Hai — also repeats. It is a reminder that a decade is an arbitrary slice of a cycle: the structure does not know where the decade boundary falls, and the natural units are the twelve-year branch cycle and the sixty-year full cycle, not ten.

For practical use, the 2010s hold the years most often confused at the boundary. A birth in January 2013 falls before that year's Lichun and is therefore technically still a Dragon year, while the popular calendar will call it a Snake year if it falls after Chinese New Year. Both conventions are in use; the table here follows the standard year attribution used throughout the site.

The same ten-year sequence occurs sixty years earlier as 1950–1959 — identical stems, identical branches, identical elements.

Questions about 2010–2019

Other decades

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