Chinese Astrology History: Texts and Traditions
Stems and branches first organized calendar time; animal correspondences and later divinatory traditions gave those coordinates further roles in Chinese astrology.
Stems, branches and animals
Wang Chong’s Lunheng, around the first century CE, records eleven branch-animal correspondences while arguing against simple five-phase animal victories. The Dragon pairing is absent from that passage, though it refers to twelve branch animals.
The zodiac race
The Great Race is a circulating folk story explaining animal order. It has several retellings and no single canonical classical text. The old branch-animal correspondences and the story belong to different kinds of evidence about the tradition.
From calendars to charts
BaZi, Zi Wei, Feng Shui and the Changes share some vocabulary while arranging it differently. Calendar calculation supplies dates and terms; a tradition supplies how those coordinates are read.