The you hour in bazi is the Rooster hour (酉 Yǒu), 17:00–18:59 — sunset, when the light turns gold, the birds come in to roost and the day is tallied and put in order. In element terms 酉 is yin Metal: refined, precise, finished. It is the hour of completion and judgement, the moment things are counted, sorted and made clean.
The Rooster hour (酉) and its time range
You is the tenth Earthly Branch and the peak of the Metal phase. Where the Monkey hour improvised, the Rooster hour perfects — the fine edge, the audited ledger, the well-set table. Its yin Metal is exacting and self-aware, with an eye for detail and appearance that can shade into fastidiousness.
The Rooster hour pillar by day stem
The stem on 酉 follows from the day stem through the Five Rats rule (五鼠遁 wǔshǔdùn):
| Day stem | Rooster hour pillar |
|---|---|
| 甲 Jiǎ | 癸酉 |
| 乙 Yǐ | 乙酉 |
| 丙 Bǐng | 丁酉 |
| 丁 Dīng | 己酉 |
| 戊 Wù | 辛酉 |
| 己 Jǐ | 癸酉 |
| 庚 Gēng | 乙酉 |
| 辛 Xīn | 丁酉 |
| 壬 Rén | 己酉 |
| 癸 Guǐ | 辛酉 |
One hidden stem, undiluted: 酉 holds only 辛
Like 子 and 卯, the Rooster is a “pure” branch. Its hidden stems (藏干 cánggān) list is a single entry: Xīn 辛 (Yin Metal). No minor qi softens or complicates the message — the hour palace speaks with one voice, and that voice is the jeweller’s Metal. Purity cuts both ways. A Geng 庚 or Xin 辛 Day Master born in this hour gains a flawless root at the destination, real weight on the side of a strong-chart verdict; a Yi 乙 Day Master finds Seven Killings 七杀 sitting undiluted in the children and later-life palace, pressure with no cushion in the branch itself. In between: for a Jia 甲 Day Master the hidden 辛 is Direct Officer 正官, for a Bing 丙 Day Master it is Direct Wealth 正财, and for a Ren 壬 Day Master it is Direct Resource 正印 — rank, reward and refuge respectively, each stated plainly. The full single-and-multiple listing lives on the hidden stems table.
What being born in the Rooster hour colours
The hour is the destination pillar — children, output, ambition and later life. Refined yin Metal at that destination reads as precision and standards: people whose later chapters are defined by craft, discernment and a demand for things done properly, drawn to detail, presentation and quality. The Rooster hour carries a clear, discriminating mind and an instinct for order. Its risk is perfectionism and sharp criticism when the exacting eye turns on others. Whether the Metal reads as excellence or as severity is settled by the balance of the whole chart.
Company changes the Rooster too. A 卯 elsewhere in the chart meets 酉 in the Six Clashes (六冲 liùchōng) — blossom against blade, often felt as recurring cut-and-regrow episodes around whatever the hour palace governs. A 辰 nearby forms the 辰+酉 pairing of the Six Combinations (六合 liùhé), leaning toward Metal and steadying the whole destination. These checks come before any pronouncement about the hour.
Clock time, solar time and the Rooster boundary
The window given for the Rooster hour, 17:00–18:59, 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 Rooster 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 17:00 or 19:00, treat the neighbouring hour as a live possibility until the solar correction is done; the calculator linked below makes both corrections automatically.
Reading it off your own chart — with or without a recorded time
Cast your chart and look at the hour column: a lower character of 酉 confirms the sunset birth, and the upper character should match your day stem’s row in the table above — 丁酉 on a Bing or Xin day, 辛酉 on a Wu or Gui day. That last pillar, 辛酉, is yin Metal stacked on its own root, the purest Metal hour in the sixty. If no time was recorded, start from the three pillars you trust — Day Master, season, luck cycles all survive — and reconstruct the hour from the household’s evening rhythm: before dinner, as the sun set, when the lights came on. Sunset is a strong memory anchor, which favours 酉 reconstructions. When the choice narrows to the Rooster or a neighbour, cast both and weigh the destinations: the Monkey hour’s versatile yang Metal, the Rooster’s exacting yin Metal, the Dog hour’s banked Earth. People generally recognise which ending they are living.
Fixing your own Rooster hour
The hour pillar is derived, not read off a calendar. To see 酉 among all sixty hour pillars, use the master hour stem table; the preceding Monkey hour page holds the late afternoon, and the neighbouring Dog hour page carries sunset into dusk. 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.