Vietnamese zodiac

Look up your animal sign, stem-branch pillar and nap am element, or compare two birth years for compatibility. Everything is calculated in your browser.

Andreas Cellarius · Public domain

Auspicious-day selection is being built on the site's verified lunar conversion. It will be added once the day pillar has been checked as well.

Want to go deeper than the animal sign?

If you know your birth hour, the chart page sets out your twelve palaces and fourteen major stars, and reads the current day, month and year against them.

Cast your chart

See all twelve signs

Rat

Cat

Dog

About the twelve animal signs

The twelve animals — Rat, Ox, Tiger, Cat, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig — are the twelve earthly branches, and each lunar year carries one. The system is shared across Vietnam, China, Korea and Japan, with small differences: the fourth animal is a cat in Vietnam and a rabbit in China.

Stems, branches, and the sixty-year cycle

The animal is only half of it. The other half is the ten heavenly stems. Pairing a stem with a branch gives the year its full name, such as Giáp Thìn or Ất Tỵ. Because the lowest common multiple of 10 and 12 is 60, a stem-branch combination repeats exactly once every sixty years. That is why a sixtieth birthday was traditionally treated as one complete turn of a life.

This matters when reading: two people born in Dragon years twelve years apart carry different stems, and therefore different elements. Most traditional interpretation reads the stem-branch pair, not the animal alone.

Born in January

This is where most mistakes happen, and it affects a great many Vietnamese people. The animal year changes at Tết, the lunar new year — not on 1 January. Anyone born in January or early February very likely still belongs to the previous year's animal.

For example, someone born on 20 January 2023 is not a Cat but a Tiger, because Tết that year fell on 22 January. The tool above works from the Tết boundary. If your birth date falls close to it, the site says so rather than picking a side.

The compatible threes and the clashing fours

Tam hợp — three signs four years apart, considered compatible: Monkey-Rat-Dragon, Tiger-Horse-Dog, Snake-Rooster-Ox, Pig-Cat-Goat.
Tứ hành xung — four groups considered to clash: Tiger-Monkey-Snake-Pig, Rat-Horse-Cat-Rooster, Dragon-Dog-Ox-Goat.

One thing is worth saying plainly: many Vietnamese families still use the clashing groups to block a marriage. Nothing shows that animal signs predict whether a marriage lasts, and a decision that size should not rest on a system that even its own tradition treated as one factor among many.

The animals in order, and why that order

The traditional story has the Jade Emperor holding a race, with the first twelve animals to arrive taking the twelve places. The rat rides the ox across the river and jumps off at the bank to finish first; the cat is tricked out of the race entirely, which in Vietnamese tellings is why cats and rats remain enemies — and in Chinese tellings is why there is no cat in the cycle at all.

The story is late and the sequence is older than it, but it does something useful: it fixes an order that would otherwise be arbitrary, and it explains the one difference between the Vietnamese and Chinese cycles better than any historical account.

The element of the pair

Each stem-branch pair also carries an element in a scheme called nạp âm — names like Gold in the Sea, or Fire in the Furnace. This is the third layer, and it is what more careful readings use when weighing compatibility. This site shows it alongside the animal, so you see the whole thing rather than only the memorable part.

Common questions

I was born in January — which animal am I?+

Most likely the previous year's, because the lunar year had not turned over. The boundary is Tết, and its date moves each year, from late January to mid-February.

Is it the Cat or the Rabbit?+

In Vietnam, the Cat. Same earthly branch, Mão, but Vietnamese tradition assigns a cat and Chinese tradition a rabbit. Neither is wrong — this is a cultural difference, not an arithmetic one.

Should the clashing groups be taken seriously?+

They are part of the tradition and worth knowing. Using them to decide who to marry has no basis. If two people work well together in real life, a table of birth years should not be what stops them.

Which is more accurate, the animal signs or the star signs?+

Neither has scientific support. They differ in origin and method, not in accuracy.

Why does the heavenly stem matter?+

Because naming the animal is only half an answer. Someone born in 1976 and someone born in 1988 are both Dragons but carry different stems, and traditional practice treats them as two different things — which is why two people of the same animal sign get told different things by the same reader.

Can a birth year say whether this year will go well?+

The tradition has methods for it, and this site presents them as part of the tradition. But do not postpone anything important on that basis — nothing shows a birth year determines how a year turns out.