Xin Metal is the eighth of the ten Heavenly Stems in Chinese style fortune telling. What are the Heavenly Stems and what do they show us? They don’t give any information about life or our circumstances—instead, they show us our ideas. Xin Metal is the eighth archetype in Chinese cosmology. It is the facilitator and the strategist. If you want to check to see if Xin Metal represents your personality in Chinese astrology, find a bazi chart calculator and look for your day stem. Your day stem is the anchor of your day and represents your personality.

(I titled this article “day master” because the day stem of your chart is often translated as “day master” and this is the most common search term related to the concept. However, you can call your day stem your day destiny, your chart ruler, or simply your day stem.)


In my last article about the ten heavenly stems, I went over why Geng Metal or yang metal is metal that is used for killing. What is yin metal or Xin Metal then? The character for Xin 辛 is actually a plow or some form of farming instrument. It is not a weapon but a tool.

Some people get upset because their day stem is Xin Metal. “Oh, I’m destined for a life of toil and hardship,” they lament. The character Xin, which really just means labor, is inside of the words for toil, hardship, and struggle. 辛苦 means struggle. Literally translated, it means bitter labor.

But do all Xin Metal people suffer? If your day master is Xin Metal, then you are destined for a lifetime of struggle?

Of course not. Xin doesn’t have any negative meaning. It just means labor and most people don’t like to work so we have a negative impression of Xin Metal.

Xin Metal people work very hard. Their minds are always working very hard. When they focus, they focus. If they think, they analyze. They think about everything not once but twice, three times, and then four times. If they look at something, they don’t just glance. They really look. They study every detail and they watch for the story to shift. If they draw or write, they don’t just scribble. They create very detailed impressions of what they are rendering using lines or words.

That’s why, when Xin Metal people decide to commit to something, they tend to get very obsessed. If you were to use a plow to loosen a whole field, then you would need to spend a whole day doing repetitive actions again and again. That’s the energy of Xin Metal. They don’t go through anything once. They go through it again and again.

You can call it overthinking. Or, you might call it intelligence.

Xin Metal is known for its sharpness, its delicacy. The animal that contains the energy of yin metal is Chicken. All birds have super precise vision because they can hunt tiny bugs from miles up in the air. Chickens have dinosaur eyes. They hone in on any tiny movement and, when they strike, they do so with precision.

Azealia Banks is a Xin Metal day master. I think that she is known for her sharp words. When she insults people, she does so in a way that will hurt. When she dissed Elon Musk, she said that he had pig skin. Surgical precision. You can’t argue with a Xin Metal person.

Some people compare Xin Metal with jewelry. Xin Metal is like gold or silver, like rings or bracelets. Xin Metal can be beautiful. Marilyn Monroe was a Xin You or Metal Chicken day pillar. But was Marilyn Monroe known for her beauty? She was known for her wit, her ability to play the dumb blonde with self aware sorrow, and for her connections. Her lover, Kennedy, was also a Xin Metal person. So was Winston Churchill and the famous military strategist of the state of Shu, Zhuge Liang.

Is Xin Metal beautiful? Sometimes, just like everyone else. Xin Metal knows how to dress up, how to appear exactly the way they want to appear. Metal is reflective. Xin Metal people are self aware. They know how to shape their eyebrows so that they appear older or younger, more elegant or more casual. They have awareness over who they appear and so exercise control over their images.

Xin Metal isn’t just personally self aware. They are also socially self conscious. A lot of Xin Metal people are very focused on the difference between real friends and fake friends. They’re always trying to suss people out, sniff them out. They know how to tell the difference between your persona and who you are on the inside.

I think that it’s worth it to explain, at this point, the concept of 做做 or zuozuo. 关系是做出来的，爱是做出来的. What does this mean? Relationships are cultivated/fabricated. Love is cultivated/fabricated. Sometimes, this line is a joke and, other times, it’s a femme’s lament. Love takes work and some of us get stuck with the brunt of it. Those who get stuck with the brunt of the work of cultivating love often get called artificial.

That’s why Xin people are reputed to be good looking. They put work into their appearance. They put work into their relationships, into their love.

What is a tool? A tool is an instrument. It’s a thing that doesn’t serve just one use but multiple uses. Take a screwdriver for instance. If a screwdriver could only be used to make bookshelves and nothing else, then it would be useless. Tools are useful and meaningful when they are versatile enough to fit multiple uses. Xin Metal people aren’t rigid. All yin stems are more resilient than the yang stems. Xin Metal people pursue a variety of options in any given circumstance.

These people are tinkerers. They like to experiment. They like to experiment with different kinds of relationship dynamics, with different words and ways of thinking, and with different mediums for expression. Xin Metal people can’t be just one thing. They have to try everything at least once.

Xin Metal people are strategists. They possess intelligence, self awareness, and curiosity. Xin Metal, because it represents tools and instruments, is the one who loves to tinker and to experiment. However, just those things alone don’t make one a good strategist.

Just like Geng Metal, Xin Metal is future oriented. Metal is used to overturn the earth, to prune away what has wilted to make room for new buds. That’s why metal is the energy of the fall which is harvest season. Xin Hai year or Yin Metal Pig year was also the year of the Xinhai revolution.

Harvest is the activity of cutting things off to be used. You cut things, process them, sort them, and you weigh them. You judge things for their importance, for their maturity and usefulness. Harvest time is the time of saying, “Okay, this is done growing. It’s ready to be used in a new way.” Harvest is about discernment, about separating the fruits from the seeds and the sticks from the reeds.

The stereotype of a Xin Metal person is the guy who has a bunch of friends and gets them all together so they can network and collaborate. It’s the type of person who knows a little bit about everything and a person from all walks of life, the kind of person who gives a little benefit to every type of person and takes a little use from everybody too. That’s the stereotype.

In reality, Xin Metal people might be introverted. They’re not always these charismatic smooth talkers. They are experimental and socially curious which means that they are always trying new relationship models with people. They are also discerning. Xin Metal people are always trying to discern the truth from untruth. That’s why they seek out so much diversity in thought. They are only trying to believe half of what they hear.