Chinese zodiac

The animal comes from the twelve-year cycle, the element and yin or yang from the ten heavenly stems, and both are counted from the zodiac year your date falls in, not from the raw Gregorian year. That is why a late-January birthday usually belongs to the previous animal. The bundled Lunar New Year table runs 1900 to 2100 on Beijing-time new moons; for the earliest decades it can differ from historical almanacs by a day, since the pre-1929 calendar kept Beijing local time rather than the modern offset. Li Chun is the day the sun reaches 315 degrees of celestial longitude, and the fixed 4 February stand-in used here can be off by a day in some years. The compatibility readout is a fixed lore matrix, tradition rather than a forecast.