What is my saju animal? The 60 Korean zodiac color animals

How is a Korean zodiac color animal named?

A color animal is the plain name of one pillar of a saju chart. Each pillar pairs a Heavenly Stem (cheongan, 천간, 天干) on top with an Earthly Branch (jiji, 지지, 地支) below. The branch gives the animal and the stem gives the color. In the example above, a birth on March 15, 1995 at 14:30 in Seoul, the section "Your animal signs" reads Blue Snake 乙巳 from the day pillar and Blue Pig 乙亥 from the year pillar. Both are Blue because both stems are 乙 (eul). The branches 巳 (sa) and 亥 (hae) are the Snake and the Pig.

The twelve animals follow the twelve branches in order, from 子 to 亥: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig. The color comes from the element of the stem. The ten stems form five pairs, one pair for each of the five elements, and each element has a traditional color. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, in its entry on color, gives the set: Wood is cheong (청, 靑), Fire is jeok (적, 赤), Earth is hwang (황, 黃), Metal is baek (백, 白) and Water is heuk (흑, 黑).

In each pair the first stem is yang and the second is yin, which is why the pillar table above labels 乙 as Yin Wood. Yin and yang do not change the color.

Four of the five colors translate cleanly. Cheong does not, because the word does not follow the line English draws between blue and green. Wikipedia's article on the blue–green distinction in language notes that in Chinese the character 靑 (also written 青) names shades from yellowish green through deep blue, and that the native Korean word pureuda (푸르다) can mean blue or green depending on what it describes. This site writes Blue for every 甲 and 乙 pillar. Korea.net, the official website of the Republic of Korea, made the same choice when it described 2024, the 甲辰 year, as the Year of the Blue Dragon. A Wood Snake or a Green Snake in another source is the same pillar as the Blue Snake here.

Why are there 60 color animals and not 120?

Ten stems and twelve branches could form 120 pairs, but the calendar cycle uses only 60 of them. The count starts at 甲子 and moves one stem and one branch forward at every step: 甲子, 乙丑, 丙寅 and so on. The stems start over after ten steps and the branches after twelve, so the two lists come back to 甲子 together only after 60 steps, the lowest common multiple of 10 and 12. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, in its entry on saju, calls the result yuksipgapja (육십갑자, 六十甲子), the sixty pairs that run from 甲子 (gapja) to 癸亥 (gyehae), and says that a saju chart is written in them.

Because both lists advance together, an odd-numbered stem only ever meets an odd-numbered branch. The five yang stems (甲, 丙, 戊, 庚, 壬) pair with the Rat, Tiger, Dragon, Horse, Monkey and Dog. The five yin stems (乙, 丁, 己, 辛, 癸) pair with the Ox, Rabbit, Snake, Sheep, Rooster and Pig. Each animal therefore meets five stems, one from each element, and appears once in each color. Twelve animals in five colors make 60. There is a Blue Rat (甲子) but no 乙子, and a Blue Ox (乙丑) but no 甲丑.

What are the 60 Korean zodiac color animals?

The grid lists all 60 pillars. Each cell gives the name exactly as the calculator prints it, followed by the two characters of the pillar in hanja (한자, 漢字), the Chinese characters used in Korean. Find the row of the animal, then the column of the color.

Read in cycle order, the names run Blue Rat, Blue Ox, Red Tiger, Red Rabbit, Yellow Dragon and onward: the animal changes at every step and the color at every second step. The cycle opens with the Blue Rat (甲子) and closes with the Black Pig (癸亥). Black Monkey is 壬申, the Water stem 壬 over the Monkey branch 申. White Horse is 庚午, the Metal stem 庚 over the Horse branch 午. Korea.net describes 2024, the Blue Dragon year (甲辰), as the 41st year of the 60-year cycle, and 甲辰 is the 41st pair when the cycle is counted from 甲子.

Year animal or day pillar animal: which one is yours?

Both are. A chart has four pillars, so it holds four color animals, and the calculator names two of them: the one from the year pillar and the one from the day pillar. By the grid above, the example's month pillar 己卯 is a Yellow Rabbit and its hour pillar 癸未 a Black Sheep.

The year animal comes from the year pillar. Its animal is the sign Koreans call tti (띠). The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture defines tti as the Earthly Branch of the year a person was born, named after an animal. Everyone born in the same saju year shares it. The color of the stem narrows it from one year in twelve to one year in sixty: a Horse year comes every 12 years, a Red Horse year every 60.

The day pillar animal comes from the day pillar, ilju (일주, 日柱), a word also romanized as iljoo. Days are counted through the same 60 pairs, one pair a day, and the count does not restart with the month or the year. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture notes that the day pillar is taken as it stands from the day's sign in the manseryeok (만세력, 萬歲曆) almanac, because each day has its own sign, unrelated to the year or the solar terms. The day animal therefore changes every day and comes back every 60 days. The example's birthday, March 15, 1995, was a Blue Snake day (乙巳), and March 16 was a Red Horse day (丙午).

The two counts are independent, so the year animal says nothing about the day animal. They coincide only on the six or seven days in each saju year when the pair of the day is the same as the pair of the year.

The stem of the day pillar is the Day Master (ilgan), so the color of the day animal is the Day Master's element under another name. The example's Day Master is 乙, Yin Wood, and its day animal is Blue. The Day Master guide describes all ten stems. The branch of the day pillar, the animal, is one of the things the saju compatibility calculator compares between two people, because the six harmonies and the six clashes are relations between branches. In the example pair on that page a Snake day (乙巳) meets a Pig day (丁亥), and 巳 and 亥 clash.

When does each color animal year start?

In saju the year pillar changes at Ipchun (입춘, 立春, the Beginning of Spring), a solar term that falls around February 4. It does not change on January 1, and it does not change at Lunar New Year. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture states the rule in its entry on saju: in this practice the new year begins at Ipchun, so a birth after Lunar New Year but before Ipchun still takes the year pillar of the old year. This calculator compares the moment of birth with the exact instant of Ipchun. The table gives that instant for the years 2020 to 2030, to the minute, in Korea time and in UTC. The times are the calculator's own, computed with the open-source calendar library named on the About and method page.

Each year pillar lasts from its own row to the next. The Red Horse year pillar (丙午) runs from 05:02 on February 4, 2026, Korea time, to 10:46 on February 4, 2027.

Korean New Year coverage uses the same names. The Korea Herald's graphic of January 1, 2026 presents 2026 as the Fire Horse year, byeongo (병오, 丙午), and adds that, because fire is associated with red, the year is often called the Year of the Red Horse. That is the everyday use of the name, for the calendar year as a whole. By the saju count, a child born in Seoul on January 20, 2026 has the Blue Snake as the year animal. A child born on February 10, 2026 already has the Red Horse, a week before Lunar New Year, which fell on February 17 that year.

For birth years outside the table, find the row of your animal below. Each cell lists the years from 1924 to 2043 that carry that color animal, and each of those years runs from Ipchun of that year to Ipchun of the next. If your birthday falls in January or in the first days of February, the calculator above is the safer check, because the answer can depend on the hour.

The same pair returns every 60 years. The years listed for the Black Monkey are 1932 and 1992, and for the White Horse 1930 and 1990.

What if you were born near Ipchun, late at night or at an unknown time?

Three cases can move the answer by a year or by a day. The calculator settles each one by a fixed rule.

A color animal is a label for a position in a calendar cycle. What a Blue Snake or a Red Horse is said to mean belongs to tradition, and the calculator makes no prediction from either animal. To see the two pillars among all eight characters, use the saju calculator on the home page, and follow the guide to reading a saju chart for the order in which they are read. The page on what saju is covers where the practice comes from.