火 Fire

What this phase represents

Fire (火 huǒ) is the phase of heat, light and peak activity — the blaze of a flame and, by extension, the height of energy and visibility. Where wood is about growing, fire is about flourishing: brightness, warmth and the upward leap of a flame are its signature images. The character 火 pictures rising flames and is the radical behind many characters for heat, cooking and light.

Associations

Fire corresponds to summer, the hottest season; to the south, the warm quarter of the sky in the traditional orientation; and to the colour red, long the most festive and auspicious colour in Chinese culture. Its qualities are radiant and outward — illumination, ardour, liveliness — making fire the phase of culmination, when growth has reached full strength.

Cultural use

In the sexagenary calendar, years ending in 6 or 7 are fire years, giving the zodiac its "Fire Horse" or "Fire Goat" labels. Red, fire's colour, saturates festival life — couplets, lanterns and lucky envelopes at the New Year — and the south-and-summer pairing carries into the spatial scheme used in fengshui and in the ordering of the bagua trigrams. The character 火 is a productive element in everyday vocabulary and appears in names and arts wherever brightness and warmth are the theme.

In the two cycles

In the generating cycle (生) fire makes earth — what a fire leaves behind is ash, which returns to the soil — so fire produces earth and is itself produced by wood, its fuel. In the overcoming cycle (克) fire melts metal, the way a forge softens and reshapes it, so fire restrains metal and is in turn restrained by water, which quenches it. Its place in the ring is 火→土, just after wood.

Fire years

Each phase colours two consecutive years of the sexagenary calendar. These are the fire years in the 1924–2046 window, with the zodiac sign of each.

Further reading

• Wuxing (five phases) — Wikipedia
• Sexagenary cycle (stems and branches) — Wikipedia