Year of the Monkey 申

Year of the Monkey: personality traits

Popular Chinese zodiac tradition, written plainly. For reflection, not prediction.

Character

If you were born in a Monkey year, the popular tradition makes you the cleverest sign in the cycle: inventive, playful and endlessly curious, the one who solves with a trick what other people grind through. Monkeys are quick, funny and good company, and they know it. They learn anything fast, get bored faster, and have a gift for the unconventional answer to a problem everyone else has given up on. The sign is associated with wit, mischief and a refusal to take the serious thing entirely seriously.

In love and friendship

In love the Monkey is charming, entertaining and harder to pin down than it lets on. It needs a partner who laughs and who is not fooled, because a Monkey will test what it can get away with. The tradition pairs the Monkey with the Rat and the Dragon in the Water Three Harmony and gives it the Snake as its six-harmony partner, the still one who sees through it and stays anyway. Friends of a Monkey get the best stories and are occasionally the subject of them.

At work and with money

At work the Monkey thrives on problems: engineering, invention, comedy, trading, software, any field where the clever route beats the obvious one. It is brilliant at starting and improvising and less reliable at maintaining, and it needs an Ox nearby for the paperwork. Money is made in ingenious ways and lost the same way; the tradition calls the Monkey lucky and admits that luck is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The growing edge

The shadow of wit is mischief, and cleverness used to dodge rather than to build. A trick played one time too many, on the wrong person, costs a Monkey the trust it did not know it was spending. The growing edge is sincerity: saying the plain thing without the joke wrapped round it, and finishing the boring half of the clever idea. The tradition enjoys the Monkey and warns it that being amusing is not the same as being believed.

The five kinds of Monkey

Each year pairs the Monkey branch with one of five Heavenly Stem elements, so the same animal comes in five flavours across the sixty-year cycle. Popular tradition reads them like this; the hub explains why the branch element never changes.

Wood Monkey · 1944, 2004 →

The Wood Monkey is the most ambitious and the most thorough, a trickster who also reads the manual.

Fire Monkey · 1956, 2016 →

The Fire Monkey is the most energetic and competitive, inventive at speed and impatient with anyone slower.

Earth Monkey · 1968, 2028 →

The Earth Monkey is the most reliable of the five, calm and studious, cleverness with a steady hand.

Metal Monkey · 1980 →

The Metal Monkey is strong-willed and independent, sharp in business and slow to trust.

Water Monkey · 1992 →

The Water Monkey is the most sensitive and the most secretive, ingenuity turned toward reading people.

Monkey years

• 1944Wood Monkey
• 1956Fire Monkey
• 1968Earth Monkey
• 1980Metal Monkey
• 1992Water Monkey
• 2004Wood Monkey
• 2016Fire Monkey
• 2028Earth Monkey

The popular zodiac year starts at Lunar New Year, not 1 January. Born in January or early February, check the boundary with the finder on the hub. BaZi turns the year at Li Chun instead, which the hub also explains.

Monkey compatibility

Three Harmonies · 三合

Monkey 申 · Rat 子 · Dragon 辰. The Water Three Harmony (申子辰): the trio popular charts call most compatible.

Six Harmonies · 六合

Monkey 申 + Snake 巳. The secret friend: quiet support rather than fireworks.

Clash · 六冲

Monkey 申 ↔ Tiger 寅. Opposite branches: friction that takes effort, not a verdict on any real pair.

Commonly cited lucky numbers: 4, 9; popular material, no canonical source. What the three structures are, and why they come before any compatibility chart, is on the hub. A full match reads all four pillars, not the year branch alone. Run a real match →

The branch 申

Branch

申 shēn

Polarity

Yang

Branch element

Metal

Direction

West-southwest

Season

Early autumn, Northern Hemisphere

Chinese double-hour

15:00–17:00

申 shēn is the yang Metal branch of early autumn and the double-hour of late afternoon. It is the year turning toward contraction, Metal in its first, active form. The Monkey is the mnemonic; 申 is the branch that starts the Water Three Harmony, because the Water the year is heading toward is born in Metal.