Earthly branch 2 of 12
The Ox
丑Chou
The animal is the memorable half of a pairing whose other half does the work. The branch 丑 is a position in a twelve-part cycle that names an hour, a month, a direction and a phase — and the ox was fitted to it, not the other way round.
- Double hour01:00–02:59
- DirectionNorth-northeast
- Fixed phaseEarth
One position, four scales
What 丑 names
One branch marks a place in four different cycles at once. These are the same position counted in different units.
- 01
- 02
- 03
- 04
Geometry of the branch circle
Its fixed relations
Three relations are decided by position alone: the branch opposite, the branch it pairs with, and the two it forms a triangle with. None of them is a judgement about people.
Folklore of the sequence
The Ox in the Great Race
The folk tale that explains the order of the twelve — told, as it usually is, about an order the calendar had already fixed centuries before any animal was attached to it.
Place2of 12
Steady in the current and willing to carry passengers, the Ox would have led the field on merit and finished second on trust. It is the only animal in the story to be beaten by its own kindness.
The twelve branches appear on Shang oracle bones, where they name days; the animals are attached to them much later. The race is how the tradition accounts for an inherited order rather than how that order came about. The full ordering legend
Five meetings in sixty years
The five Ox pillars
A branch meets only five of the ten stems, because stems and branches advance together and their parities stay locked. That is why there are sixty pairs rather than a hundred and twenty.
Move around the circle