Chinese zodiac 2027: the Year of the Goat

2027 is a Goat year. The sixty-year cycle writes it 丁未 (Ding-Wei): Ding is Yin Fire and Wei is the Goat, so it is often called the Fire Goat year. By the Chinese calendar it begins on Lunar New Year’s Day, Sat 6 Feb 2027. Four Pillars (BaZi) changes year earlier, at Li Chun, Thu 4 Feb 2027, 09:46 China time.

Year

2027, the Goat, number 44 of 60 in the cycle

Stem and branch

丁未 Ding-Wei · Yin Fire stem, Goat branch

Goat year by Lunar New Year

6 Feb 2027 to 25 Jan 2028

Goat year by Li Chun (BaZi)

4 Feb 2027, 09:46 to 4 Feb 2028, 15:31

The year before

2026, the Horse (丙午)

The year after

2028, the Monkey (戊申)

Dates are China dates and China Standard Time (UTC+08:00). Your own clock is further down.

Born in early February 2027: four examples

Each row is one birth moment, put through the Chinese calendar tool’s three references. The answer changes with the rule, and with which calendar day the birth falls on.

Time zones: your clock and China’s

Li Chun is a single instant for everyone, so it falls on a different clock time where you live, and on 3 February in the Americas. Lunar New Year is different: it is a date on the China calendar. The Chinese calendar tool opens on the China date reference, which turns your birth moment into China’s date before looking it up. The Entered local date reference looks up the date you typed instead. They disagree when your birth falls on one side of midnight at home and the other in China, as in the New York row above.

times in UTC

Your clock appears once the page has loaded; until then, and when you choose it, the column shows UTC. The new moon is the astronomical event behind Lunar New Year. Here it falls at 6 Feb 2027, 15:56 UTC, which is 6 Feb, 23:56 in China: about four minutes before the date would change. The Hong Kong Observatory’s table for 2027 lists 6 Feb as the first day. In UTC+09 the same new moon falls at 7 Feb 2027, 00:56 on the clock there, a day later; calendars kept to another meridian are separate conventions that this page does not compute.

When the year changes: Lunar New Year, Li Chun and a fixed 4 February

The Hong Kong Observatory changes its official sexagenary year on the first day of the first Chinese lunar month, and notes that fortune tellers tend to use Spring Commences, Li Chun, instead. Astral Atlas follows both and says which it uses.

The Astral Atlas Nine Star Ki tool never uses Lunar New Year. The longer list of calculation settings that make charts differ is in Why does my chart look different on another site?

Goat years from 1931 to 2039

Each row gives the Goat year under both rules, then the births on which the two rules give different animals. A birth before both start points belongs to the year before; a birth after both belongs to the Goat year. Between 1931 and 2039 the two start points are anywhere from 40 minutes (1943, the same day) to 15 calendar days (2015) apart.

All times are China Standard Time held at UTC+08:00, the way the Chinese calendar tool does; the clocks people actually kept in the 1930s or 1980s could differ. The tool’s range is 1901 to 2100. Fire Goat (丁未) years return every 60 years: 1907, 1967, 2027, 2087.

What the tradition says about the Goat

Name. The character 羊 (yáng) covers goats and sheep, so English writers say Goat, Sheep or Ram. Astral Atlas says Goat, as the Hong Kong Observatory does for the branch Wei (未) in its table for 2027.

Character. Popular zodiac writing calls the Goat peace-loving, kind and popular; Wikipedia credits this wording to Gill Hale’s Practical Encyclopedia of Feng Shui. It is a folk description of an animal. It is kept here as tradition, and no calculation on this site uses it.

Relationships in the branch tables. The classical tables list these pairs and groups for the Wei branch. The labels name listed combinations; this page turns none of them into advice about who suits whom.

Tai Sui. Wikipedia describes Tai Sui (太歲) as a Chinese name for stars directly opposite Jupiter in its roughly twelve-year orbit, personified as deities, with sixty of them, one for each year of the stem and branch cycle. It reports that in Taoism people whose birth sign clashes with the year’s Tai Sui are said to face disturbances that year. Read with the clash table above, that practice treats the clash partner of the Goat, the Ox, as the sign that clashes with the 2027 Tai Sui. This page lists no other animals and gives no forecast for 2027.

Sources

• Hong Kong Observatory, What year is it today? (Hui Tai-wai, April 2018) ↗
• Hong Kong Observatory, Gregorian-Lunar Calendar Conversion Table of 2027 (Ding-wei year of the Goat) ↗
• Hong Kong Observatory, The 12-Year Animal Cycle ↗
• Hong Kong Observatory, Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches ↗
• Hong Kong Observatory, The 24 solar terms ↗
• National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, 2027 solar terms (立春, 315°, Japan Standard Time) ↗
• Joey Yap, Hack Your Destiny With BaZi (stem phase and polarity table) ↗
• Wikipedia, Goat (zodiac), citing Gill Hale, The Practical Encyclopedia of Feng Shui (2002), p. 20 ↗
• Wikipedia, Tai Sui ↗
• Blooming Grove Studio, Nine Star Ki lessons 1 to 3 (fixed 4 February year) ↗

More on the terms: Lunar New Year, Li Chun, sexagenary cycle, Earthly Branch and the Chinese lunisolar zodiac guide.