Chinese Zodiac Years 2040–2043 — 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 span is incomplete by design. The year tables on this site cover 1900 through 2043, so the 2040s here contain only four years rather than ten — and those four are the last entries of the current sixty-year cycle, ending on Gui-Hai in 2043.

Geng-Shen opens the span: Yang metal on Yang metal, since Shen's main hidden stem is Geng. A stem sitting on a branch of its own element is read as reinforced rather than mixed, which makes 2040 one of the more one-directional metal years in the cycle.

Gui-Hai closes it: Yin water over the water branch that stores Jia wood. Hai holds wood inside it, and water generates wood, so the pairing is generative in structure even though both characters are winter-weighted. The sequence then returns to Jia-Zi in 2044, which is a new cycle rather than a continuation.

Because the branch span is only Shen, You, Xu, Hai, the four animals born in these years are Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig. The remaining eight animals do not appear in a birth year within this range — which is a direct consequence of the data limit rather than anything about the cycle.

The same ten-year sequence occurs sixty years earlier as 1980–1989 — identical stems, identical branches, identical elements.

Questions about 2040–2043

Other decades

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