1 January 2026 — a Masthead for The Year of the Horse

Seeds of Fire

丙午馬年

Today, the 1st of January 2026, marks the formal launching China Heritage Annual 2026, the theme of which is Seeds of Fire.

This China Heritage series celebrates four decades since John Minford and I published Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience. It is also a year crowded with many far more significant calendrical commemorations.

Although the lunisolar Year of the Horse 丙午馬年 does not start until 17 February 2026, China Heritage is revealing its new masthead today and, in doing so, we also note that 2026 is a Fire Horse Year 火馬年 one in which — according to traditional astrology and modern orientalist cliché — danger 危 supposedly also promises possibility 機. The last Fire Horse Year was in 1966, one of the most dramatic years in Chinese history in which a full-blown calamity 危機 was visited upon the land, its people, its culture and its thinkers. This time around long before this Fire Horse Year, calamity had already struck, albeit on the other side of the Pacific.

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The masthead of Seeds of Fire: China Heritage Annual features a photograph by Lois Conner, a New York-base artist and longterm collaborator with our work (see The Affinities of Art). It shows a bronze sculpture of the Dragon-Horse Bearing the River Image 龍馬負圖 at the Pavilion of Mists and Rain in the Imperial Summer Palace and Hunting Lodge at Chengde 承德避暑山莊煙雨樓. According to tradition, the Sage Emperor Fuxi 伏羲 studied the geomantic mysteries of the River Image to devise the trigrams and hexagrams that form the I Ching, China’s ancient classic of divination.

As noted in the above, the year 2026 overlaps with the Year of the Horse 丙午馬年, and so a mystical creature that is said to have revealed hidden patterns seems like an ideal mascot for our investigations into the logics of 120 years of Chinese change and those who maintained a freedom of spirit and an independence of mind.

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Fuxi 伏羲 outlining a divination text, painted by Guo Xu 郭詡 of the Ming dynasty. Source: Shanghai Museum

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My thanks to Lois for allowing China Heritage to use her work and to Callum Smith for designing the masthead. For an overview of the other mastheads of China Heritage, see:

The Mastheads of China Heritage, 2016-2026

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We end this New Year’s greeting with a painting and a poem by Lao Shu 老樹, the Beijing artist with whom we bid farewell to 2025 (see Lao Shu at Year’s End). The theme of his painting for 1 January 2026 is ‘waiting’.

My involvement with a project that eventually led to the publication of Seeds of Fire in 1986, began with my contributions to Trees on the Mountain, including a partial translation of The Bus-stop 車站, an absurdist play by Gao Xingjian 高行健 on the themes of waiting, frustration and individual choice. It was banned and denounced shortly after it was first performed in Beijing in 1983.

Despite various claims about China’s ‘arrival’, ‘waiting’ remains an ineluctable theme for men and women of conscience, both in China and elsewhere. In 2026, they have been joined by a host of others who both wait and agitate. Among some of their concerns and frustrations are the senescence of autocrats, the status of Taiwan, the future of elections, the impact of economic disruption, a cessation of, or a meaning pause of, mass murders, the space for and possibility of civic action, and much more. For this reason, the topic of ‘waiting’, be it in the past or in the foreseeable future, will also feature in Seeds of Fire: China Heritage Annual.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
1 January 2026

New Year’s Day