Year of the Goat 2027: the Year of the Fire Goat

What is the Year of the Goat?

The Year of the Goat is the eighth year in the twelve-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac, after the Horse and before the Monkey. The next one begins on Saturday, 6 February 2027, and runs until 25 January 2028. It is the Year of the Fire Goat, the first since 1967.

In Chinese it is yang nian, pronounced roughly "yahng nyen". The word yang covers goats and sheep alike, which is why the same year is called the Year of the Goat, the Year of the Sheep and the Year of the Ram in English. All three are translations of one word, and none of them is wrong.

Most pages about the goat year are horoscopes. This one sticks to what can be checked: the calendar dates, how the animal got its place in the cycle, and what Chinese books from the last two and a half thousand years actually say about goats and sheep. Every quotation below was compared with the Chinese original, and the translations are our own.

Year of the Fire Goat 2027: dates and what Fire Goat means

Chinese New Year 2027 falls on Saturday, 6 February. New Year's Eve is Friday, 5 February, and the Lantern Festival that closes the holiday is on 20 February. The goat year ends on Tuesday, 25 January 2028, and the Year of the Monkey starts the next day.

Why Fire Goat? Chinese years are counted with two interlocking sets of signs: ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches. Each branch has an animal, and each stem belongs to one of the five elements, which are wood, fire, earth, metal and water. The year 2027 is ding-wei. Wei is the branch of the goat, and ding is a fire stem, so 2027 is a Fire Goat year.

Ten stems and twelve branches pair up in sixty combinations, so the same stem and branch meet only once every sixty years. The last Year of the Fire Goat ran from 9 February 1967 to 29 January 1968, and the next after 2027 will be 2087.

There are two fire stems, and they are not the same kind of fire. Bing, the stem of 2026, is the strong, outward fire that tradition compares to the sun. Ding, the stem of 2027, is the quiet one, compared to the flame of a lamp or a candle. That is the "fire" in Fire Goat: a small steady light, which sits easily with an animal known for mildness.

Almanacs add one more label that surprises people. Under a scheme called nayin, each pair of years in the sixty-year cycle gets a poetic element name of its own, and the pair 2026 and 2027 is called Water of the Heavenly River, a name for the Milky Way. By that reckoning the Fire Goat year is also a water year. These systems are layers of convention laid down over many centuries, and they were never meant to agree on a single answer.

One caution. Some fortune-telling traditions change the zodiac sign at Lichun, the solar term called Start of Spring, instead of at the lunar New Year. In 2027 Lichun falls on 4 February, two days before New Year's Day. The dates on this page follow the lunar New Year, which is the everyday convention.

Years of the Goat: full dates from 1931 to 2039

A goat year never matches a Western calendar year exactly, because the Chinese New Year moves between late January and the middle of February. Anyone born in January or early February should check the exact dates:

• 17 February 1931 to 5 February 1932: Metal Goat
• 5 February 1943 to 24 January 1944: Water Goat
• 24 January 1955 to 11 February 1956: Wood Goat
• 9 February 1967 to 29 January 1968: Fire Goat
• 28 January 1979 to 15 February 1980: Earth Goat
• 15 February 1991 to 3 February 1992: Metal Goat
• 1 February 2003 to 21 January 2004: Water Goat
• 19 February 2015 to 7 February 2016: Wood Goat
• 6 February 2027 to 25 January 2028: Fire Goat
• 24 January 2039 to 11 February 2040: Earth Goat

A person born on 20 January 1980 is therefore a Goat, not a Monkey, and a person born on 1 February 1991 is a Horse, because the goat year had not yet begun. The dates come from the calendar tables published by the Hong Kong Observatory.

Goat, sheep or ram? What yang means

Every twelve years English-language newspapers ask whether it is the Year of the Goat or the Year of the Sheep. The honest answer is that Chinese does not make the choice. Yang is a single word for the whole family. A goat is a shanyang, a "mountain yang"; a sheep is a mianyang, a "cotton yang"; and when people say yang nian they do not need to pick.

It has been that way for a long time. The Erya, a glossary compiled around the third century BCE, lists two kinds of yang under one heading, each with its own words for male and female.

Guo Pu, who annotated the Erya in the fourth century, explains the first kind as the white yang and the second as the black. Readers two thousand years ago already had more than one animal in mind when they saw the word, and so did the people who gave the year its name.

In practice, the picture depends on where you are. Goats are the common animal in much of southern China, sheep on the northern grasslands, and New Year paper-cuts show bearded goats with straight horns about as often as sheep with curled ones. Neighboring countries had to choose, and chose differently: in Japan the sign is a sheep, and in Vietnam it is a goat. In English, "goat" and "sheep" are both in everyday use, and "ram" tends to appear when a designer wants impressive horns.

Why the goat is eighth: the branch wei

The goat owes its place to the eighth Earthly Branch, wei. The branches are older than the animals. They were already used to count days on Shang dynasty oracle bones, more than three thousand years ago, and the animals were attached to them later.

The earliest transmitted book that pairs the branches with the animals we know is the Lunheng, written by the skeptic Wang Chong around 80 CE. He was not explaining the zodiac. He was attacking the theory that animals fight because of the five elements, and he quotes his opponents:

The same chapter names eleven of the twelve animals in passing, which shows that by the first century the system was common knowledge. Wang Chong's reply is characteristically blunt: if earth conquers water, he asks, why do oxen and goats not kill pigs?

Wei also names a time of day and a month. The wei hour runs from 1 to 3 in the afternoon, and the wei month is the sixth month of the lunar calendar, in high summer. The Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, explains the character wei by a pun on a word for "flavor": it is the sixth month, when things have ripened and gained their taste.

As for the well-known story of a race in which the Jade Emperor ranks the animals by the order they arrive, it is a folk tale told in many versions, and none of them can be traced to an early text.

Year of the Goat meaning: luck, beauty and good manners

In the old texts, yang is a lucky word. The Shuowen Jiezi defines the character with a single sound-alike word, xiang, which means auspicious. The animal also sits inside several of the most positive characters in the language, including those for good, right and lucky. The dictionary's entry for "beautiful" explains one of them.

The six domestic animals are the horse, ox, yang, pig, dog and chicken. A big, fat one was a beautiful sight to a hungry household. Flocks were also the plain measure of wealth, as in an ode from the Book of Songs that praises a lord's herds:

The animal's reputation for gentleness has a precise source. In the second century BCE the Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu explained why a minister presents a lamb as his formal gift at court:

Benevolent, principled, well-mannered: this is very nearly the personality that zodiac guides give to people born in goat years today. The kneeling lamb in particular became proverbial. A Ming dynasty primer of sayings that children once learned by heart puts it in one line.

One more piece of luck comes from a pun. The phrase san yang kai tai, "three yang open the way to peace", comes from the lore of the Book of Changes, where the hexagram Tai, "peace", has three unbroken yang lines at its base and is matched with the first month and the return of spring. That yang is a different word, written with a different character, but it sounds the same, so New Year pictures show three goats under a rising sun.

Goats and sheep in Chinese myth and legend

The real animal is mild, but the yang of Chinese legend is not always so. Five stories are worth knowing.

The first is the xiezhi, the one-horned beast of justice. Wang Chong reports what scholars of his day said about it:

Gao Yao was the legendary minister of justice under the sage king Shun. Wang Chong himself was unimpressed and asked why an animal with one horn should be wiser than one with two. The image outlasted him: law officers of the Han dynasty wore a cap named after the xiezhi, and its statue still stands outside courts and law schools. Like the qilin, it is a one-horned beast that never harms the innocent.

The second is a monster. On Mount Kunlun, the Shan Hai Jing places an animal that looks like the gentlest thing on the farm and is not.

The Tulou has its own page in our bestiary. So does the Paoxiao, a beast with a goat's body, a human face and eyes under its armpits, which later readers identified with the gluttonous Taotie.

The third is a miracle. The Shenxian Zhuan, a collection of lives of the immortals attributed to Ge Hong in the fourth century, tells of Huang Chuping, a shepherd boy led off into the mountains by a Daoist. Forty years later his brother finds him and asks where the sheep went. Chuping takes him to a hillside covered in white boulders.

Huang Chuping is the figure worshipped today as Wong Tai Sin, whose temple is one of the busiest in Hong Kong.

The fourth is the founding legend of Guangzhou, which is still nicknamed the City of Rams. An early local record, lost as a book but preserved in later quotations, describes a painting in the governor's hall.

A later version, recorded in the Song dynasty, adds five immortals riding rams of five colors, who bring the grain themselves. A statue of the five rams is now the emblem of the city.

The fifth is history that turned into legend. Su Wu, a Han envoy to the Xiongnu, was detained in 100 BCE for refusing to change sides. The History of the Han records the terms of his exile.

He herded those rams for nineteen years, still holding the staff of a Han envoy, and "Su Wu tending sheep" became the standard Chinese image of loyalty under hardship.

Year of the Goat personality, compatibility and the "unlucky" saying

Popular zodiac guides describe people born in the Year of the Goat as gentle, calm, kind, creative and inclined to avoid a quarrel, with indecision as the usual fault. That portrait comes from modern almanacs and popular guides, not from the classical texts quoted on this page, so take it as a tradition, not as a finding. It is worth noticing, though, how closely the list follows Dong Zhongshu's lamb: armed but peaceful, patient, polite.

Compatibility charts come from the way almanacs group the Earthly Branches, not from anything about the animals themselves:

• Wei forms a "three harmonies" group with the branches of the Rabbit and the Pig, so those two are called the Goat's best matches.
• Wei pairs with the branch of the Horse in the "six harmonies".
• Wei stands opposite the branch of the Ox on the wheel of twelve, so Goat and Ox are said to clash.

There is also a folk saying that of ten people born in goat years, nine will have an incomplete life. It is aimed mostly at girls, and it is still heard often enough that some couples are said to plan around goat years. Nothing in the classical sources supports it. In the texts quoted on this page the animal stands for luck, beauty, justice and good manners, and the people who wrote them would have found the saying baffling.

One custom applies to every sign. Your own zodiac year, called your benming nian, is traditionally a year to be a little careful in, and people mark it by wearing something red. For anyone born in a goat year, 2027 is that year.

This page does not offer predictions for 2027. No old text makes them, and we would have to invent them.

The goat at Chinese New Year 2027

Expect the goat everywhere in the first weeks of 2027: on red envelopes, paper-cuts, stamps and shop windows, sometimes drawn as a sheep, sometimes as a goat, and as often as not in threes for the sake of the old pun.

The festival it arrives with has its own creature, the Nian monster, the beast said to be driven off by red paper and firecrackers on New Year's Eve. The only mythical animal among the twelve signs is the Chinese dragon, whose year last came around in 2024.

For more animals from the old books, see our guide to Chinese mythical creatures and the Shan Hai Jing bestiary. The Tulou, the four-horned goat of Kunlun, is one of 43 beasts you can field in our free browser game Beasts of Shanhai.