Ten goats, nine incomplete.
Five characters in Chinese, 十羊九不全, and there is no more of it. No verse two. Nobody can name who wrote it, and nobody has ever produced a manuscript.
It's a ratio, which is the part I keep going back to, because a ratio implies somebody counted. Nine in ten people born in a Goat year get an incomplete life, where incomplete means early death, or illness, or widowhood, or poverty, or a marriage that goes wrong, or no children, or all of it, depending on who's telling you and how much of the New Year's baijiu they've had. Which leaves one goat in ten who turns out fine. Nobody names him. There's no companion saying about the tenth goat, no folk hero, no version of the story where the lucky one walks in at the end and everybody claps. He just sits there in the denominator, statistically implied, unemployed.
Anyway.
Five characters, and they still change the month a couple decides to start trying.
What happened in 2015, and what didn't
China recorded about 16.5 million births in 2015, which was roughly 320,000 fewer than 2014. That's a drop of a couple of percent, in a year when births were supposed to be climbing, because the one-child policy had already been loosened and everyone expected a bump.
The National Health and Family Planning Commission offered the zodiac as part of the explanation. Goat year. People held off.
This did not go over well domestically. An editorial in China Daily called it "such a creative use of superstition." The paper said the explanation neither helped anyone understand the actual demographic problem nor made the population forecast more believable, which is about as close to eye-rolling as a state paper gets in print.
The Beijing Times pointed at the boring answer. There were fewer women of childbearing age in the country that year, because of who was born twenty-five to thirty years earlier. A shrinking pool of possible mothers produces a shrinking number of babies without any help from livestock.
Then there's Duan Chengrong, a demographer at Renmin University, who went and looked at the national data from 1954 to 2002 and concluded that Goat-year birth avoidance is a myth. His finding wasn't that nobody does it, only that it fails to show up at the scale of a whole country. He found provinces where it registered, and individual hospitals where it clearly registered. Then he zoomed out. The wobble disappeared into everything else that moves a birth rate in a nation of 1.4 billion people.
So the honest version is annoying, and I'm going to hand it over annoying rather than clean.
The behaviour is real. Couples do delay. Obstetricians in Goat years have described the schedule shifting. Forums fill up with expectant mothers worrying that their kid drew a bad card. And grandparents lean, hard, in a way anyone who has ever been leaned on by a grandparent will recognise instantly.
The national statistic is where it gets contested, because a two percent dip has about nine plausible parents and the zodiac is only one of them. Coverage in 2015 tended to skip that part. "Ancient curse empties Chinese cradles" is a better headline than "fertility is complicated and also there are fewer thirty-year-olds."
What nobody disputes is that families are making the decision. They're making it under pressure from people they love, about the only child they may get, and the ones who move a wedding forward or push a pregnancy back by four months are not being silly. They're doing what you do when the downside is your kid's whole life and the cost of avoiding it is one slightly inconvenient spring. Whether it worked is not something anyone in that conversation will ever be able to check.
The Empress who was born in a Goat year
The saying probably comes from here. I want to flag that "probably" before we go any further, because it's carrying a lot.
The account goes that 十羊九不全 doesn't appear in the record before the Xianfeng reign, which ran 1850 to 1861, and shows up afterward. Reporting in People's Daily and elsewhere traces it to political feeling in the late Qing, when an enormous number of Chinese people were extremely unhappy with the people running the country, and the people running the country included Empress Dowager Cixi.
Cixi was born in 1835. Goat year.
She spent nearly half a century as the effective ruler of China, through the reigns of two emperors she outlived and one she put on the throne herself, across a stretch of history that included foreign occupation of the capital, the loss of a war to Japan, enormous indemnities, and the Boxer Uprising. Her reputation is genuinely contested among historians now and was not contested at all at the time by the people paying for it.
And the two most powerful officials of the era, Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, were also born in Goat years. 1811 and 1823. Both Goats.
So you have three of the most blamed figures in nineteenth-century China sharing one zodiac sign, at a moment when saying anything direct about the throne was a spectacularly bad career decision, and what surfaces instead is a folk saying about how Goat people are cursed.
(Cut to a man in a teahouse, saying something about goats, very loudly, to nobody in particular.)
You could not build a cleaner mechanism if you sat down to design one, since it lands on the Empress without naming her and can be said in front of anybody at all. On the surface it's a remark about livestock.
The trouble with that story
It might not be true.
Wu Yucheng, a folklore researcher, has argued straightforwardly that Cixi can't be the source, on the grounds that the prejudice against Goat-year births shows up in writing well before her.
The strongest single piece of evidence is a Ming dynasty novel. In Jin Ping Mei, there's a scene where a fortune teller explains the misfortunes of Li Ping'er by telling her that in a previous life she was a man who killed a pregnant ewe, and in this life she came back as a woman born in a sheep year, and that this is why she has a fine husband and constant illness. That's the belief, fully formed, with a karmic backstory attached, centuries before Cixi was born. Jinghua Yuan, an early-nineteenth-century Qing novel, carries the same prejudice, and it also predates her.
There's a further wrinkle that I love and do not trust. One popular account holds that the original saying was 十羊九福全, "of ten goats, nine are complete with fortune," which is a straightforwardly nice thing to say about a person, and that 福 (fortune) got worn down in oral transmission into 弗, which functions as "not," which then modernised into 不, so the sentence came out the far end meaning precisely the opposite of what went in.
Which would be an outstanding story. It's also exactly the kind of story people invent when they'd like a superstition to have a tidy origin, it's usually offered without a source, and I'd file it in the same drawer as every other folk etymology that's a bit too satisfying to check.
Nope.
A rumour with a ratio in it travels further than a rumour without one. That's probably what actually happened here. The fair summary is that the specific claim about Cixi is popular in Chinese media, has a real mechanism behind it, and does not survive contact with the Ming and Qing novels. Something older and vaguer had been drifting around for centuries without much force. The late Qing appears to have picked it up, sharpened it into five characters with a number in them, and pointed it at somebody. Which is a less satisfying answer than either of the popular ones, and it's the one the evidence supports.
Sheep, goat, ram, and the character that means auspicious
The animal is 羊, yáng, and English cannot pin it down.
Chinese doesn't split the category the way English does. Professor William H. Baxter of the University of Michigan has put the basic sense of 羊 as "sheep," with the complication that the same character, given a modifier, also covers goat and ram and ewe and lamb. Professor Lingchei Letty Chen at Washington University in St. Louis has called it a generic word for sheep, goat and ram together, so ambiguity is guaranteed the moment it goes into English. When you need to be specific in Chinese you build it: 山羊, mountain-yang, is a goat, and 綿羊, cotton-yang, is a sheep. The animal stays one animal until you make it two.
This is why the greeting-card industry has a small annual breakdown every twelve years, and why 2015 got reported as the Year of the Sheep, the Year of the Goat and the Year of the Ram simultaneously, by outlets that were all correct.
(The plush toys went with goat almost universally, which I assume is for the same reason cartoon foxes are always orange. A goat has a silhouette and a sheep has a texture, and texture doesn't survive being made small.)
It isn't an error anybody made. It's two languages carving the same field at different joints.
And the character itself is not remotely sinister. 羊 sits inside 祥, which means auspicious. It's in 善, which means good, and in 美, which means beautiful. The word for auspicious has a sheep in it.
Folklore experts make this point every time the Goat-year worry comes around, because the older association of this animal was with luck, mildness and plenty, which sits at an awkward angle to the idea that being born under it wrecks nine lives in ten.
What the Goat is supposed to be like
The Goat comes eighth of the twelve. Its earthly branch is 未, wèi, which holds the hours from one to three in the afternoon and the sixth month of the lunar year. It's yin, and its fixed element is earth. It gets along with the Rabbit, the Horse and the Pig, and it's said to clash with the Ox.
In the race story, the Goat doesn't cross the river alone. The Goat, the Monkey and the Rooster build a raft together and argue about steering the entire way over, which is either a story about cooperation or a story about three animals who could not have managed it individually, and the tradition has generally been polite enough to go with the first one.
The character description, in the standard telling: gentle, kind, artistic, sensitive to other people's moods to the point of exhaustion, allergic to conflict, drawn to beauty and comfort, and constitutionally unable to say no when asked for help by somebody who is standing right there looking at them.
Now, that reading has a problem, and the problem is that it's suspiciously well suited to the Western wellness-adjacent zodiac industry, which worked out about a decade ago that "sensitive artist who overgives" is the single most flattering thing you can tell a person about themselves. Every Goat profile in English says the same eight things. Empathic, creative, a natural peacekeeper, too nice for this world. Needs beauty like medicine, requires rest, has never once held a boundary, and is sitting on a well of resentment underneath all that agreeableness that leaks out sideways as passive aggression.
Some of that is genuinely in the tradition. Some of it is a horoscope column wearing a Tang dynasty hat.
The traditional material is drier and less complimentary and considerably less interested in your feelings. It's about temperament inside a family and a village: mildness read as softness, dependence as something the household would end up carrying, and a specific anxiety about girls born in Goat years, who in the old framing were thought to face harder marriages and thinner support.
Ugh.
That last part is the ugly root of the birth-timing behaviour and it deserves naming plainly rather than smoothing over. The saying never fell on everybody equally.
None of which stops Goat-year people from being fine, obviously. Bill Gates is a Goat. So is Steve Jobs, and so is Li Keqiang, and that counter-list has been trotted out in Chinese newspapers every Goat year for decades by writers who are visibly tired of having to do it.
The five Goats
The sixty-year cycle gives each animal five versions, one per element, and this is the part of the system that actually does something, because it's what makes 1979 and 2015 different rather than identical.
Wood Goat, 1955 and 2015. The growing one. Wood is the element of expansion and of things that get built slowly and then keep going, and a Wood Goat reads as generous and community-minded, the sort who starts something and then hands round the tools. The standing warning is depletion. You can tend everyone's garden and lose your own to the weeds without noticing, because nobody sends you a bill for it.
Fire Goat, 1967 and 2027. The one with a temper under the wool. Fire brings passion, visibility and a willingness to fight for something the Goat cares about, which surprises people who had filed this person under gentle and left it there. It burns out, which is the standing caution on this one.
Earth Goat, 1979 and 2039. Practical, stable, the one who finishes things. Earth is already the Goat's fixed element, so this is the animal doubled rather than modified, and what comes out is comfort-seeking, reliable and slow to move. Slow to move is also the failure state.
Metal Goat, 1991 and 2051. The one with edges. Metal supplies structure and the ability to say no, which is the thing every other Goat gets described as lacking, so the Metal Goat gets written up as the well-defended version. Defences turn into walls. There's a reason that gets mentioned every single time.
Water Goat, 2003 and 2063. The most permeable. Water is intuition, adaptability and feeling, laid over an animal already reading the emotional weather, which produces someone who knows what a person needs before that person does. And produces someone who has trouble locating where they stop and everybody else starts.
The next one is Fire Goat, running February 6, 2027 to January 25, 2028. Sixty years since the last one. If the pattern from previous Goat years holds anywhere, that's where you'd look for it.
What a saying does after everyone forgets it
Whatever the exact route it took, the version of this belief with the number in it, the one with the ratio, the one that actually gets quoted at people, appears to have been sharpened in the late nineteenth century by people who were furious about a specific government and could not say so out loud. It was a political joke. It was a way of calling one woman a disaster without being executed for calling her a disaster, and it worked, and then it kept working after she died in 1908, kept working through the fall of the dynasty in 1912, and did not stop when the country it was aimed at stopped existing in the form it was aimed at.
It's still working now. It's on parenting forums. Grandmothers who've never heard of the Xianfeng reign say it, and would be baffled to learn they were repeating a piece of nineteenth-century political trash-talk about court officials. And it's sitting inside the calculation a couple makes in October about whether to start trying now or wait until spring. Nobody in that conversation is thinking about Cixi. Nobody in that conversation has ever thought about Cixi.
That's the part that gets me. People believe old things. Most of what people do is believe old things, and this one at least has the courtesy to be short.
The trouble is that it was never old to begin with. Somebody aimed it. The aiming is the only reason it exists, and it's the exact part that fell off first.
An insult only becomes a fact once everyone's forgotten who it was for.
