The Dragon, 5th Chinese sign (branch Chen)

Meaning

The Dragon is the fifth branch of the cycle of twelve, the one Chinese charts write as Chen. It is the only one of the twelve that does not name a real animal, and the misunderstanding must be cleared at once: in a Chinese chart, Dragon is not a creature of legend, it is the common name given to a segment of the calendar, the end of spring. What it describes fits in one sentence: the breadth that aims large and bears measure badly.

The Dragon’s first word is scope. It thinks in large format, immediately considers the scale above, and finds narrow what satisfies others. Its charisma comes from that rather than from any talent for seduction: when someone sees wide and says so without trembling, people follow. The Dragon draws others less by persuasion than by the size of what it proposes.

Its ambition and its idealism go hand in hand. It does not aim only at success, it aims at what ought to be, the high version of things. Idealism gives the direction, ambition supplies the engine, and the whole moves fast as long as nothing forces it to trim.

The downside is called demandingness. What the Dragon asks of others it first asked of itself, but that does not make the demand any lighter to carry. Measure weighs on it, compromise feels to it like giving up, and it sometimes loses the whole of a project for having refused to keep half of it.

This portrait describes a tendency, not a person. In a BaZi chart the animal of the year is only one character out of the eight the chart contains, and the other seven can support it as easily as contradict it.

The branch and its element

Chen is Earth, in its Yang phase: the terrain rather than the garden, the soil that carries before it is laid out.

Three heavenly stems hide in it, which makes it a dense branch. Wu, Earth Yang, doubles the element of the branch and gives it its footing. Yi, Wood Yin, extends within it the spring that Chen brings to a close, since the next branch already opens summer. Ren, Water Yang, adds a depth the surface does not let anyone guess.

Watch the name Wu. The Wu hidden in Chen is a heavenly stem, that of Earth Yang. One branch of the cycle is also romanised Wu, that of the Horse: two distinct Chinese characters that pinyin writes the same way, and neither can ever be deduced from the other.

Chen holds the 3rd BaZi month, in April, after the solar term Qingming, at the end of spring. Its direction is East-Southeast, its double hour runs from 7am to 9am.

Alliances and clashes

Three branch relations concern Chen, and there are no others.

Its Liu He combination ties it to You, the branch of the Rooster, and that meeting produces Metal. The Earth of the Dragon and the Metal of the Rooster agree on a clean, structured result, one that gives form to the scope of the first.

Its Liu Chong opposition sets it against Xu, the branch of the Dog. Both are Earth Yang: the axis does not pit two contrary elements against each other, it sets face to face two grounds of the same nature disputing the same soil. It is a clash between like and like, often rougher than a disagreement between opposites.

Its San He trine gathers Shen, the branch of the Monkey, Zi, the branch of the Rat, and Chen. That trine produces Water, the very element Chen shelters in secret with the stem Ren.

These three relations are read between the branches of one chart, or between a chart and the period it is going through. They say nothing about the agreement between two people reduced to their year of birth, a shortcut that remains the most widespread misreading of Chinese astrology.

Key facts

The nine years of the Dragon closest to us, with the heavenly stem that opens each one. All carry a Yang stem, like the branch itself.

Keywords

• scope
• charisma
• ambition
• idealism
• demandingness