1973 Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Water Ox
1973 is the year of the Yin Water Ox. The Water Ox year runs from February 3rd, 1973 to January 22, 1974. If you were born in 1973 on or after February 3, your Chinese zodiac sign is the Ox and your element is Water. Born earlier in January? You belong to the year before.
Born in January or early February 1973? Read this first
The Chinese zodiac year does not start on 1 January. The Water Ox year begins on February 3rd, 1973. That one date changes the answer for everyone born in the weeks before it.
You were born before the new year turned, so you belong to 1972's sign — not 1973's.
Read the 1972 page instead →The rest of this page is yours. Everything below describes the Yin Water Ox.
This is the single most common mistake in Chinese astrology, and it is why two people born weeks apart in the same calendar year can have completely different signs.
What a Water Ox actually is
A Water Ox is someone born in a Ox year that also carries the Water element. In Chinese astrology your animal is your zodiac sign (it shapes who you are), and the element is the "energy flavour" running through it that year. So a Water Ox blends the Ox's nature with Water's energy of depth, intuition and adaptability — a more specific portrait than the Ox alone.
Water in plain terms. Water is the energy of winter — deep, quiet and endlessly resourceful. It adds wisdom, perception and the ability to flow around any obstacle rather than fight it.
They read what is beneath the surface and find the path no one else sees.
When Water pools it can become fearful, withdrawn or hard to pin down.
Ox strengths and blind spots
Where you are strong. Ox-year people achieve through sustained effort where others quit. They are honest almost to a fault, deeply loyal, and build things that last. Their word is their bond.
Where it costs you. Oxen can be stubborn, slow to change, and resistant to spontaneity. Their strength of conviction sometimes hardens into rigidity.
Work that suits a Water Ox
Builder, architect, farmer, surgeon, accountant, engineer, teacher, judge.
Read that as a description of the conditions you do your best work in, not a list you have to pick from. Water shapes how you work as much as the Ox shapes what you are drawn to.
Who the Ox gets on with
In the classical system the twelve animals fall into groups that support each other and pairs that grind. For the Ox, the natural allies are Rat, Snake and Rooster, and the hardest work tends to be with Goat, Horse and Dog.
Lucky colours, numbers and hours for the Water Ox
These belong to the Ox as a sign, which means they are shared by everyone born in a Ox year. A colour chosen for you works differently: it is picked to feed whichever of the five elements your own chart is short of, and two Oxs can need opposite colours for that reason.
Other Water Ox years
The animal cycles every 12 years and the element every 10, so the exact pairing Water Ox only comes round once every 60 years. Anyone born in these years shares your sign exactly:
Your birth year is one pillar out of four
Everything above is true of you — and equally true of everyone else born in 1973. Millions of people share the Water Ox sign.
What separates your chart from theirs is the month, day and hour you were born. Those three add three more pillars to the one on this page. Together they decide whether your core element — the character at the centre of your chart, traditionally called your Day Master — is supported or drained, which of the five elements you are carrying too much of, which one is missing, and which ten-year cycle you are standing in right now.
That is the part a page about 1973 cannot know. It needs your birth time.
See your full chart, not just your year
Free, and it takes a birth date. Your Energy Chart reads all four pillars and shows the element balance behind them.
or browse every zodiac year →