Whichever of four common rulebooks a list follows, the 2027 Goat year names the same four animals for 犯太岁, "offending Tai Sui" (fan taai sui in Cantonese, shio ciong in Indonesian): the Goat, the Ox, the Dog and the Rat. We ran the five counting schemes that turn up on ranking pages and temple lists, and only the narrowest, which counts the year's own animal and the one that clashes with it, names fewer. By the Chinese calendar the year starts on Saturday 6 February 2027. By the 立春 rule it starts at 09:46 on 4 February, Hong Kong time, which is the same clock as Singapore and Malaysia.
Tai Sui is folk belief, and nothing here says it predicts anything. 羊 is translated Goat, Sheep or Ram depending on the page; all three mean the same year.
Although the animals match, the Dog's label changes from page to page
A list does more than name animals. It says which of five relations each one has with the year: 值 (zhí, your own animal's year, the 本命年), 冲 (chōng, "clash", the animal directly opposite on the wheel), 刑 (xíng, "punishment"), 破 (pò, "break") and 害 (hài, "harm"). Singapore's Thian Hock Keng prints "Conflict" for 刑 in its English brochures, so a reader holding one will not find the word "punishment" on it.
We tabulated twelve ranking pages for 2027 in Chinese, English and Indonesian. Three we read in full; the other nine we read through a summarising tool, so their exact wording is unchecked. Ten of the twelve name the same four animals. Where they part is the labels. The Dog is 刑 alone on four pages, 破 alone on one, both on five, and unlabelled on two. A page promising "five signs" can still name only four animals, because it counts the Ox twice, once for 冲 and once for 刑. At least one Chinese page adds the Dragon, citing 「辰未相破」, a pairing that appears in no 破 list we found.
Unless a rulebook counts only the clash, the Goat year keeps its four animals
Taiwanese and Hong Kong pages already say that the count depends on the school. What they have not shown is where. We modelled five schemes seen in the wild and ran them over the twelve-year cycle. The common modern one counts all five relations with six 破 pairs. Another uses the four 破 pairs of 《三命通會》, the Ming astrology compendium. A third drops 破, a fourth drops 刑, and the narrowest keeps only 值 and 冲.
| Scheme | Animals named for 2027 | Signs flagged per year across the cycle |
|---|---|---|
| All five relations, six 破 pairs | Goat, Ox, Dog, Rat | 4 or 5 |
| All five, 《三命通會》's four 破 pairs | Goat, Ox, Dog, Rat | 3 to 5 |
| No 破 | Goat, Ox, Dog, Rat | 3 to 5 |
| No 刑 | Goat, Ox, Dog, Rat | always 4 |
| 值 and 冲 only | Goat, Ox | always 2 |
Four of the five give the same four animals for 2027. That is a property of the Goat year, not of the rules, and it does not hold every year. In 2026, dropping 破 removed the Rabbit. The 《三命通會》 text is explicit about its shorter list: 卷三 names 「卯与午，丑与辰，子与酉，未与戌，皆相破」 and then drops the Tiger–Pig and Snake–Monkey pairs with 「故不取」. Its 卷二 gives 刑 a direction, 「戌刑未」 and 「未刑丑」, which is why the Dog and the Ox both pick up 刑 in a Goat year.
While the almanac breaks the Ox, the popular lists break the Dog
破 means two different things. In the almanac tradition, 歲破 is simply the branch that clashes with the year. The Qing imperial almanac treatise 《欽定協紀辨方書》 quotes an older source defining it as 「歲破者太歲所衝之辰也」. For a Goat year that is the Ox, and it is why some 2027 pages print "岁破 northeast", the Ox's direction. The popular 破太岁, by contrast, pairs the Goat with the Dog. A page that says the Ox breaks Tai Sui and another that says the Dog does are both following a real tradition.
The earliest version of the taboo we found is about neither. Wang Chong's 《論衡·難歲》, from the first century, records a rule for moving house: 「徙抵太歲凶，負太歲亦凶」, moving towards Tai Sui is unlucky and so is moving away from it. The chapter's title means "refuting the year taboo". Wang recorded the belief in order to argue against it.
If a birthday falls before Lunar New Year, its calendar year names the wrong animal
The Hong Kong Observatory's 2027 table puts 正月初一, the first day of the lunar year, on Saturday 6 February 2027, and its solar-term data puts 立春 at 09:46 on 4 February. The Goat year runs to 25 January 2028. Ranking pages tend to pick one rule without mentioning the other. One English page starts the year at 立春; a Hong Kong florist's page says the animal changes at Lunar New Year. Because the Goat year starts after one 立春 and ends before the next, it has none inside it, which our guide asking whether 2027 is a year without spring explains.
The bigger error is the shortcut of reading the animal off the Gregorian year. We checked every date from 1901 to 2100 against the lunar calendar. For 9.54% of them, about one date in ten, the Gregorian year gives a different animal. The dates at risk run from 1 January to the day before Lunar New Year, which can fall as late as 20 February, as it did in 1985. Under the common table, being read as the following year's animal changes the 2027 verdict for seven of the twelve signs.
Someone born on 20 January 1991 is a Horse by both lunar rules. Read by the Gregorian year, they become a Goat, which the common table puts at 值太岁 in 2027, while a Horse has no relation to the Goat year at all. Our guide to Chinese age works through a birthday ten days earlier in the same year. Until 30 September 2026, our Tai Sui checker asked for a birth year, which is the shortcut. It now takes a date, and shows the 立春 answer beside the Lunar New Year one when they differ. The two lunar rules also split inside 2027 itself: a baby born on 5 February 2027 is a Goat by 立春 and still a Horse by the Chinese calendar.
Because generals change every year, some 2027 guides still name the Horse year's
Each year of the sixty-year cycle has its own Tai Sui general, and temples name them. The list published by 玉皇玉聖宮, a temple in Tainan, gives 2027 as 「丁未年太歲星君諱繆丙（伍炳）大將軍」: 繆丙, Miao Bing, with a variant name, 伍炳. The same list gives 2024 as 李誠, which is also the name the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Singapore used that year. Three of the ranking pages name 繆丙 for 2027.
At least three guides from Hong Kong florists, near-copies of one another, give 2027's general as Wen Zhe, 文哲. That is the 2026 general, and the error has travelled with the template. Eight of the twelve ranking pages name no general at all.
Whenever a Singapore temple publishes a list, it names four animals
We found nine yearly lists from three Singapore temples, covering 2017 to 2026, six of them from Thian Hock Keng. Every one names exactly four animals. Only three of the nine match the common modern table animal for animal. In 2024, the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple listed the Dragon, Dog, Ox and Rabbit, while Thian Hock Keng listed the Goat in place of the Rabbit. For 2026, Thian Hock Keng and 韮菜芭城隍庙, a City God temple, both list the Rooster for the Horse year. The Horse–Rooster pair appears in none of 《三命通會》's 刑, 害 or 破 pairings, and we found no source for it. Thian Hock Keng uses no 害 label in any of its six lists.
The temples also frame it differently from the ranking pages. The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, for instance, calls Tai Sui 「本命守护星君」 and writes that 「太岁并不是凶神，而是守护神」, meaning Tai Sui is not a malevolent deity but a guardian. The City God temple's FAQ invites anyone to 拜太岁, whatever their animal, and in 2025 added a suggestion no ranking page carries: people of any sign born in the first, fourth, seventh or tenth lunar month might come too.
The dates are the temples' own, and they are 2026's. Thian Hock Keng held 拜太岁 from the second to the fifteenth day of the first month. The City God temple ran it from 20 February to 18 March, the fourth to the thirtieth day, and holds 谢太岁, the year-end thanks, from 16 to 20 December 2026. Hong Kong pages call the same pair 攝太歲 and 還太歲. No Singapore temple has published a 2027 list yet; Thian Hock Keng's usually appears in January.
Thian Hock Keng's own page describes the red packet devotees bring, 压岁钱, as "in accordance with the devotee's age where every 10 cents correspond to 1 year of age". The cents are Singapore cents, and the page does not say which age it means: the one on an identity card, or the older Chinese reckoning that usually runs a year or two higher.
