The 10
Heavenly or
Celestial Stems
(天干,
Mandarin tian1gan1,
Japanese tenkan) combine with the 12
Earthly Branches
to form the traditional 60-year
Chinese calendar.
While this calendar is
obsolete for all official use, it
lives on in
Chinese astrology, and the 12-year cycle of the
Chinese zodiac ("
Year of the Dragon" etc) is in fact
determined by mapping the
horoscope signs on top of the
60-year cycle.
The more interesting and current use of the Heavenly Stems
is that they form a rudimentary Chinese alphabet
in the very limited sense that they can be used to rank or
order items, as in English terms like
"Plan A", "Site B" and "Group C". The system remains in heavy
use in China but is rarely seen in Japan, where the homegrown
iroha ordering of kana is usually preferred,
although this ordering -- called kouotsuhei after the readings
of A, B and C -- is still occasionally used for formal titles,
placenames, and the like. The full sequence goes like this:
甲 1 A jia3 kou
乙 2 B yi3 otsu
丙 3 C bing3 hei
丁 4 D ding1 chou
戊 5 E wu4 bo
己 6 F ji3 ko
庚 7 G geng1 kou
辛 8 H xin1 shin
壬 9 I ren2 nin
癸 10 J gui3 ki
Order: Unicode, numeral, letter, Mandarin reading,
Japanese reading
What is odd about this sequence of characters is that they are
essentially meaningless. While they of course all do have
historical meanings, there is no rhyme or reason to the order --
the first four are "armor", "strange", "fire" and "street" --
and in modern times they are rarely used for purposes
other than ranking, the unlucky number 4 (丁, a counter for
blocks) and the lucky 8 (辛, spicy/bitter)
being the exceptions. For precisely this reason
these characters are also a part of the set used for phonetic
spelling in both China and Japan.
I wonder how many people spotting the title thought this had something to do with marijuana?