Earthly Branches

Zi, Chou, Yin, Mao, Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Xu, Hai—twelve in total. They are the lower character in each pillar of the Four Pillars, corresponding to the twelve zodiac animals and twelve two-hour periods.

The Earthly Branches are more complex than the Heavenly Stems because of the Hidden Stems: each branch contains one to three Heavenly Stems within it. Therefore, its power is only clear when the Hidden Stems are considered.

⚠️ The 'Chou' in Earthly Branches shares its character in simplified Chinese with another character that means 'ugly' in traditional Chinese. So a character-by-character conversion to traditional will incorrectly convert 'Zi Chou Yin Mao'—it reads perfectly fine but is wrong. For a character comparison, see the easily confused characters entry on this site. The content on that page will not be automatically converted, but here it will.