Zodiac animal
The animal attached to your year branch: one of twelve, and one character of your chart.
In one sentence
The animal attached to your year branch: one of twelve, and one character of your chart.
How it is used
It is the most familiar way into the system and the least informative part of a chart, because it describes a year that everyone born in it shares. Inside a reading it matters mostly through how the year branch harmonises or clashes with the other three. The Saju year turns at the start of spring rather than at the calendar new year, so a birth before that boundary carries the previous animal.