Jia甲

The oracle-bone form of Jia depicts the hard casing around a seed — the shell a sprout pushes open as it breaks ground. The Shuowen dictionary glosses it as "the eldest of the East, where Yang qi first stirs." As the first stem it carries "number one" wherever it goes: top exam graduates earned the "Jia rank," the wealthiest were said to be "Jia of the region," and the leading party of a contract is still called the "Jia side" in Chinese.

As an element image, Jia is Yang Wood: the towering tree, the beam-grade timber. Against Yi Wood's flowers and vines, Jia has a trunk and growth rings — a structural, ordered, upward-driving force.

Jia carries the wood-qi of the East and of spring, in season during the Yin and Mao months. Yang Wood is straight by nature: it competes for height and would rather snap than bend. Its fears are heavy Metal felling it, flooding Water uprooting it, and fierce Fire scorching it.

The Di Tian Sui says of Jia: "Jia Wood reaches to heaven; to transform it needs Fire. In spring it tolerates no Metal; in autumn it needs no Earth." To grow into a great tree Jia wants Bing or Ding Fire to draw out its brilliance; tender spring wood cannot bear Metal's blade, and withered autumn wood gains nothing from more Earth. One line, the whole seasonal manual.

Jia combines with Ji, transforming into Earth — the classics call it the "combination of uprightness," the steadiest of the five stem pairs: Jia's integrity meeting Ji's tolerance. Combination means mutual entanglement: when Jia and Ji both appear in a chart, each is distracted by the other and their original roles are rewritten.

Jia clashes with Geng: Geng Metal is the axe, the natural feller of trees. Yet the clash is not simply bad — "the timber owes its shaping to Geng Metal." A strong Jia meets Geng and is carved into a beam; only a weak Jia dreads the axe overhead.

Jia can occupy the stem of any pillar — year, month, day or hour. On the day stem it is the Jia Wood Day Master, the chart's protagonist; the full personality and strength reading lives on the Jia Wood Day Master page. Anywhere else, it faces the Day Master as one of the Ten Gods: to a Bing Fire Day Master, Jia is the Indirect Resource; to a Wu Earth Day Master, it is Seven Killings.

The same character thus plays a different part in every chart. The correct reading order: fix the Day Master first, translate the remaining stems into Ten Gods, then judge whether this Wood energy helps or harms the whole.

The stems' oldest job is timekeeping. Jia heads the sequence and pairs with the branch Zi to open the sixty-unit JiaZi cycle — which is why "a JiaZi" means one full cycle and a sixtieth birthday is called "return of JiaZi." Shang dynasty kings took stem names (Tai Jia, Pan Geng), proof of how ancient this system is.

Jia still lives in modern Chinese: grade-A is "Jia grade," the lead contract party is the "Jia side," armor is "Jia zhuang." Once you know Jia's twin roots — "first" and "shell" — every one of these words explains itself.