Sources and methodology
How chinese-zodiac.org calculates a birth-year sign, verifies dates, distinguishes calendar facts from traditional interpretation, and keeps generated page families internally consistent.
What this site is
Chinese Zodiac is an independent English-language reference and browser tool. Its purpose is to answer common questions about animals, lunar years, five-element combinations, and traditional relationship patterns with clear boundaries and readable source notes.
Calendar membership is deterministic. Personality, luck, compatibility, and annual horoscope language is cultural folklore and is explicitly presented as interpretation rather than science.
Calendar calculation
At build time, a deterministic lunar-calendar library generates the Lunar New Year boundary for each supported year. Those dates are bundled into the page, so every browser uses the same table instead of relying on calendar implementations that can disagree at an edge case. The selected year is then mapped to its Earthly Branch animal, Heavenly Stem element, Yin–Yang polarity, and stem–branch characters.
The supported birth-date range is 1901–2100. Generated boundaries and known edge cases are checked during every production build and cross-checked against the published Gregorian–Lunar conversion tables from the Hong Kong Observatory.
Lunar New Year and Li Chun
Popular birth-year animals usually change at Lunar New Year. Some BaZi or Four Pillars schools use Li Chun, the Start of Spring, when assigning the astrological year pillar. The main calculator uses Lunar New Year because it answers the popular animal-sign question. The boundary guide documents the alternative for birthdays between the two dates.
Culture and language sources
Historical and cultural claims are checked against institutional references where possible, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s set of twelve zodiac animals and Smithsonian Lunar New Year resources. Chinese characters, pinyin, branches, and stems are cross-checked across standard reference tables.
Animal personality, lucky symbols, trines, secret friends, clashes, and annual readings vary across traditions and modern popular sources. Pages summarize common patterns, avoid presenting them as uniform doctrine, and include a non-scientific interpretation notice.
Generated page families
Year pages derive dates, animal, element, polarity, and stem–branch names from the same calculation library used by the calculator. Animal pages use editorial profiles unique to each animal. Element and sixty-sign pages combine those records with distinct element meanings, exact recurring years, compatibility relationships, and annual context.
Build-time checks validate unique titles and descriptions, one H1 per page, canonical URLs, valid JSON-LD, internal links, sitemap agreement, page-level primary keywords, and exact-phrase density near the requested three-percent range. Density is an audit constraint, not permission to publish unreadable repetition.
Privacy and corrections
Birth dates entered in the calculator remain in the browser and are not submitted to a site endpoint. See the privacy page for optional analytics and advertising disclosures. If a public contact address is configured, it appears in the footer for correction requests.