The Bing-Yin Tai Sui: General Geng Zhang

Fire riding a tiger

Bing is yang fire, the noon sun that holds nothing back. Yin is the tiger, and the hour of the tiger is the darkest time just before dawn. Wood feeds fire, so this is a year of light and courage together.

General Geng Zhang guards it. People born in Bing-Yin years are often warm, open and quick to act, with a fire in their chest that they share freely with the people they love.

Open and honest

He has a round, full face and bright, clear eyes. He wears a small black hat, a green robe with a white sash, and a bright red cape, like flames in a green forest.

He sits calmly, one hand on his year tablet, looking ready to jump up and charge at any moment.

Fifty riders before dawn

According to legend, he was Geng Zhang, a garrison officer on the northern frontier in the Eastern Han dynasty. One early spring, raiders swept south toward three farming villages. He had only about three hundred men.

He could have stayed behind the walls, as many commanders did. Instead he left two hundred and fifty men to beat drums and light signal fires, and rode out with fifty. In the dark before dawn, the raiders thought a whole army was coming. They broke and ran, and the villages were saved.

Later someone asked him, "Weren't you afraid of dying?" He said, "Yes. But the old people and the children were more afraid."

A fire that never went out

He kept guarding the border for years and died in his forties, worn out by old wounds. Heaven was moved by how he burned for others, and named him the Tai Sui of the Bing-Yin year.

A red cape on his shoulders and his face to the sun: that is his gift to everyone born in the Year of the Tiger.

Born in 1986

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