Seeds of Fire
赤馬紅羊劫
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This is the first of a series of new years cards designed for China Heritage by Callum Smith. It features a photograph by Lois Conner of a bronze horse from the tomb of Qin Shihuang on a yellow background.
According to the sixty-year cycle of the Chinese calendar, the upcoming Bingwu Year of the Fire Horse 丙午火馬年 will be the first half of what is traditionally known as a ‘Catastrophic Bing-Ding Biennium’ 丙午丁未劫, aka 赤馬紅羊劫. The totemic animals of Bing-Ding — 2026-2028 — are the horse and the ram and they are associated with the element Fire. It has long been claimed said that calamities ensue when they occur together.
The Portents of Bing and Ding 丙丁龜鑑, a Song-dynasty compendium by Chai Wang 柴望, records that up until that time either natural or man-made disasters had occurred twenty-one times during Bingwu and Dingwei years. Essays From the Rong Studio 容齋隨筆, another work of the Song period, was just as unequivocal:
During Bingwu and Dingwei years, China has repeatedly experienced major changes, be they threats born within the land or humiliations originating with the barbarians outside. 丙午、丁未之歲，中國遇此輒有變故，非禍生於內，則夷狄外侮。
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The most recent ‘Bing-Ding Biennium’ was in 1966-1968, two of the most disastrous years in post-dynastic Chinese history. The playwright and translator Yang Jiang 楊絳 called her memoir of the early Cultural Revolution《丙午丁未年記事》, or A Record of the Bing-Ding Years, which I translated as On the Cusp of Fire: The Years of The Horse and the Ram and included in Lost in the Crowd (1989).
Over the centuries, in an attempt to deflect the calendrical disaster of the 丙丁 bǐngdīng years, people would often substitute yellow for the customary festive red of the new year. We have followed this heterodox tradition here.
Regardless of which colour you choose to celebrate the advent of the Year of the Fire Horse, consider yourself warned and Happy Spring Festival to all!
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
At the end of the Yisi Year of the Snake
乙巳蛇年尾
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