Wu branch means 午
The branch 午 is the seventh Earthly Branch and is labelled Horse in the practitioner reference chart. It differs from 戊, the Wu stem. Romanized Wu-Wu therefore represents two distinct components of a pillar, not a duplicated character.
Hong Kong Observatory · stem–branch sequence and hour tables ↗Joey Yap · Day Master and branch reference table, page 5 ↗
The hour use of this branch
As an hour label, HKO assigns Wu to 11:00–13:00. In Atlas, apply that interval to the selected clock. A Wu year or day does not imply a birth during those hours: the same branch series labels different calendar units.
Hong Kong Observatory · stem–branch sequence and hour tables ↗
Separate visible and hidden components
The lower character of the selected pillar is its branch. The upper character is the visible stem. The hidden-stem inspector is a third view: it looks up the branch’s attributed internal stem membership and then compares each member with the Day Master.
Do not replace the visible stem with a hidden stem, or interpret the animal label as the whole chart. Use the pair and group inspectors for their explicitly supported membership rules; a matching label alone does not establish a transformation, strength judgement or event prediction.
Word origin · etymology
Romanized Chinese calendrical name Wu (午), ordinal 7.
Historical character derivation is not established by the cited calendar tables.
How we know · epistemology
Calendrical convention
Branch ordinal, animal and hour range are calendrical mappings, not traits.
Explore it in your atlas
Connected concepts
Read alongside this entry
Terms used in this explanation
Mentioned in 1 other entry
These links connect subjects and terminology. They do not establish a shared historical origin.
Sources & provenance
Use the citations beside each section to distinguish a calculation convention, a historical teaching and an editorial example.