What are the five elements in the Chinese zodiac?

Five qualities

The five elements are wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. Older East Asian thinking described change in the world as these five qualities supporting and pushing against each other. Saju puts that idea onto its characters.

Each character carries one

The ten stems and twelve branches each belong to an element. The stems Gap and Eul are wood, Byeong and Jeong are fire, Mu and Gi are earth, Gyeong and Sin are metal, and Im and Gye are water. Convert a chart's eight characters this way and you can count how many of each element it holds.

How a reading uses them

Readers describe wood as feeding fire and water as damping fire. A reading looks at which elements appear often, which are scarce, and which sit next to each other in the chart.

The count is a clue for reading, not a figure that fixes anyone's day or future. The same chart can be worded a little differently by different readers.