The shen hour in bazi is the Monkey hour (申 Shēn), 15:00–16:59 — the busy late afternoon when the day’s work is pushed toward completion and the mind turns quick and clever. In element terms 申 is yang Metal: hard, bright, freshly forged. It is the hour of ingenuity, tools and problem-solving, the moment the season turns from growth toward harvest.
The Monkey hour (申) and its time range
Shen is the ninth Earthly Branch and the start of the Metal phase. Its character is dexterity — the monkey’s restless, inventive intelligence, always testing, dismantling and improving. There is speed and wit in the Monkey hour, and a certain love of the clever shortcut.
The Monkey hour pillar by day stem
The stem on 申 comes from the day stem via the Five Rats rule (五鼠遁 wǔshǔdùn):
| Day stem | Monkey hour pillar |
|---|---|
| 甲 Jiǎ | 壬申 |
| 乙 Yǐ | 甲申 |
| 丙 Bǐng | 丙申 |
| 丁 Dīng | 戊申 |
| 戊 Wù | 庚申 |
| 己 Jǐ | 壬申 |
| 庚 Gēng | 甲申 |
| 辛 Xīn | 丙申 |
| 壬 Rén | 戊申 |
| 癸 Guǐ | 庚申 |
Three stems hidden inside 申
The Monkey is one of the well-stocked branches. Its hidden stems (藏干 cánggān) are Gēng 庚 (Yang Metal), Rén 壬 (Yang Water), Wù 戊 (Yang Earth) — the Metal as main qi (本气 běnqì), with Water and Earth as minor voices. In practice that means a Monkey-hour chart carries more than “Metal at the destination”: there is Water already flowing out of the Metal, and Earth beneath both. A Geng 庚 Day Master finds a proper root here; a Ren 壬 Day Master finds a hidden source. The complete branch-by-branch lookup is on the hidden stems table, with the wider stem-and-branch system explained under heavenly stems and earthly branches.
The ten gods a Monkey hour seats
Read the hour palace through the ten god (十神 shíshén) each hidden stem plays against your Day Master. For a Jia 甲 Day Master the trio is formidable: 庚 is Seven Killings 七杀, 壬 is Indirect Resource 偏印 and 戊 is Indirect Wealth 偏财 — pressure, unconventional learning and opportunistic gain all packed into the children and later-life palace. For a Yi 乙 Day Master the main qi turns civil: 庚 is Direct Officer 正官, discipline rather than siege. For a Bing 丙 Day Master it is Indirect Wealth 偏财 — deals and ventures late in the road — and for a Wu 戊 Day Master it is Eating God 食神, craft and enjoyment flowing out in the closing chapters. One branch, four very different destinies; the Day Master is the lens.
What being born in the Monkey hour colours
The hour is the destination pillar — children, output, ambition and later life. Yang Metal at that destination reads as sharp capability: people whose later chapters run on skill, cleverness and the ability to fix and reinvent, who are drawn to tools, systems and craft. The Monkey hour carries versatility and nerve; it improvises well under pressure. Its risk is restlessness — the clever mind that will not settle, or cuts a corner too many. As always, whether the Metal reads as brilliance or as scattering depends on the balance of the whole chart.
Clock time, solar time and the Monkey boundary
The window given for the Monkey hour, 15:00–16:59, is true solar time — pinned to the sun’s actual position rather than the number printed on a birth certificate. Two corrections can carry a birth across the edge of this hour. The first is longitude: a birth city rarely sits exactly on the meridian its time zone is set to, and in Singapore, where clocks run on UTC+8 while the island lies nearer 104°E, civil time can lead solar time by close to half an hour. The second is the equation of time, a seasonal wobble of up to about a quarter-hour in either direction.
Near either edge of the Monkey hour those minutes are not cosmetic. They can move a chart into the hour before or after, and with it a different hour pillar and a different final reading. This is the quiet adjustment that separates a rough chart from an accurate one, and it is why a birth time known only to the nearest hour always deserves a second look before its hour pillar is trusted. If your recorded time sits within twenty minutes of 15:00 or 17:00, treat the neighbouring hour as a live possibility until the solar correction is done; the calculator linked below makes both corrections automatically.
No recorded birth time? Work the problem in order
If the hour is unknown, resist the urge to pick one that flatters the chart. Start with what survives: day, month and year pillars still give the Day Master, its seasonal strength and the luck cycles — a genuine three-quarter reading. Then hunt the hour. Official records first; after that, family memory anchored to the day’s rhythm, and mid-afternoon has its own anchors — school dismissal, the tea break, the hottest stretch of the day. Because 申 is a two-hour block, “sometime after three” is usually enough. If it comes down to the Monkey hour versus its neighbours, cast all the candidates and compare the hour pillar each produces against the life: a 庚申 hour (Wu day) doubles hard Metal at the destination, while the same afternoon on a Yi day gives 甲申 — Wood riding on Metal, a much more contested picture. The chart that matches the lived pattern is almost always the right one.
Fixing your own Monkey hour
The hour pillar is derived, not calendrical. To see 申 among all sixty hour pillars, use the master hour stem table; the preceding Goat hour page holds the early afternoon, and the neighbouring Rooster hour page carries the afternoon into sunset. For hour boundaries and the late-Zi (晚子時 wǎn zǐshí) convention, see the birth hour and hour pillar page. Or plot your chart free with the calculator and read your hour pillar to the minute.