A 60-Year Cycle of Global Realignment
What a thousand years of history can tell us about the next two years.
This is a follow-up article.
In my last article, The Fire Horse Returns, I explored why the Bing Wu year is important in Chinese history.
Since publishing that article, just before the end of the Chinese New Year, the US and Israel took military action against Iran during ongoing negotiations. It seemed nearly timed, as if the Fire Horse was waiting for this moment. I nearly said, “I told you so.”
In this article, I want to look at a bigger picture. The Fire Horse and its partner year, the Fire Goat (Ding Wei), matter not only in Chinese history but also in world history. These years show up across societies and continents over the past thousand years. While difficult events can happen at any time, I believe the pattern during these two-year periods warrants attention.
The message here is: be prepared. History teaches us that periods of extreme pressure tend to arrive in clusters, and the people who come through them best are those who saw them coming and took steps early.
The “Red Horse and Red Goat Calamity”
As I explained in The Fire Horse Returns, the “Red Horse and Red Goat Calamity” (赤马红羊之劫) means the two-year period of Bing Wu followed by Ding Wei. Both years are linked to fire energy. Together, they create a time when things get very intense, and weak systems are likely to break.
A Thousand Years of Upheaval
1066–1067: The Norman Rupture
On 14 October 1066, two armies met at Senlac Hill, near Hastings, in what became one of the most consequential battles in Western history.
King Harold II of England had already fought one battle that month. On 25 September, he defeated a Norwegian invasion force under Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire. It was a decisive victory, but it left his army exhausted and depleted. When news arrived that William of Normandy had landed on the southern coast, Harold force-marched his troops over 400 kilometres in roughly two weeks to meet him.
The battle itself lasted most of the day. Harold’s forces held the high ground with a tight shield wall, and for hours, the Norman cavalry couldn’t break through. But late in the afternoon, Harold was killed. The exact manner of his death is still debated by historians, though the famous image of an arrow striking his eye comes from the Bayeux Tapestry, produced years after the event. What is not debated is the result: with Harold dead, the English defence collapsed.
William’s coronation on Christmas Day 1066 was only the beginning. Over the following years, he dismantled the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and replaced it with a Norman ruling class. Land was redistributed. English was pushed out of courts and governance in favour of Norman French. The legal system was restructured. Castles were built across the country as centres of control.
The English language itself was changed, taking in thousands of French words that are still used today. The system of lords and land that William established became the model for England’s governance for hundreds of years.
1066 was a Fire Horse year. And it changed the history of England forever.
1126–1127: The Jingkang Catastrophe
I covered this in The Fire Horse Returns, but it bears a brief mention here for context. The Jurchen-led Jin dynasty breached the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng, captured two emperors, and forced a dynastic fracture that reshaped China’s demographic and economic centre for generations. It remains one of the most traumatic events in Chinese collective memory and is considered the prototype for the “Red Horse/Red Goat” prophecy.
1246–1247: The Mongol Consolidation
By the mid-1240s, the Mongol Empire was the largest land empire the world had ever seen. But it had a succession problem. Ögedei Khan, the son of Genghis, had died in 1241, and for nearly five years the empire drifted under the regency of his widow, Töregene Khatun. She was politically astute, but the lack of a confirmed Great Khan created uncertainty across the empire’s vast territories.
In August 1246, a grand assembly was convened near the Mongol capital of Karakorum. Güyük, Ögedei’s eldest son, was formally elected as the third Great Khan. The event drew envoys from across Eurasia. Among them was Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, a Franciscan friar sent by Pope Innocent IV, who became one of the first Europeans to travel deep into the Mongol heartland and leave a written account of what he saw.
Güyük’s coronation stabilised the succession at a critical moment. Under his brief reign (he died in 1248), the empire reasserted its administrative reach and continued its expansion westward. The Mongol military machine, which had already devastated Eastern Europe in 1241 and 1242, remained the dominant force on the continent.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the old order was cracking. The Babenberg dynasty in Austria, which had ruled for over 250 years, came to an end when Duke Frederick II was killed in battle against the Hungarians in 1246. His death left Austria without an heir and triggered a decades-long struggle over who would control one of Central Europe’s most strategic territories. That vacuum was eventually filled by the Habsburgs, a family whose rise would change European politics for the next 600 years.
1366–1367: The Fall of the Yuan
By the 1360s, the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty, which had ruled China since Kublai Khan’s conquest, was falling apart. Decades of flooding along the Yellow River, repeated outbreaks of plague, ruinous inflation from over-printing paper currency, and widespread famine had pushed the population to breaking point. Rebellions had been erupting across southern China for years.
Zhu Yuanzhang, a former peasant and novice monk who had risen through the ranks of the rebel Red Turban movement, had by this point consolidated control over much of the Yangtze River basin. In 1363, he fought and won the Battle of Lake Poyang against his rival, Chen Youliang, in what is considered one of the largest naval battles in history, with hundreds of thousands of combatants on both sides.
By 1367, Zhu launched his northern campaign against the Yuan capital of Dadu (modern Beijing). His forces swept through the north with remarkable speed. Dadu fell in 1368, and the last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür, fled to the Mongolian steppe. Zhu proclaimed the founding of the Ming Dynasty and took the reign name Hongwu.
Zhu, a man who had been orphaned and destitute and had begged for food at a Buddhist monastery as a teenager, became the founder of one of the greatest Chinese dynasties, lasting nearly 300 years. The Ming Dynasty brought the restoration of Chinese cultural identity after a century of Mongol rule, major infrastructure projects, including the reconstruction of the Grand Canal, and eventually the maritime expeditions of Zheng He.
1426–1427: National Liberation in Southeast Asia
In 1407, the Ming dynasty invaded and occupied Đại Việt (Vietnam), dissolved its government, and absorbed it as a Chinese province. For nearly two decades, the Ming rule imposed Chinese administrative systems, Confucian education, and heavy taxation on the Vietnamese population. Resistance movements were suppressed with force.
In 1418, Lê Lợi, a wealthy landowner from Thanh Hóa province, launched the Lam Sơn uprising against Ming occupation. The early years were brutal. His forces were small, poorly equipped, and repeatedly defeated. Lê Lợi spent years hiding in the mountains, at times reduced to eating wild plants to survive. But he persevered, and his movement gradually attracted broader support.
By the mid-1420s, the tide had turned. Lê Lợi’s forces won a string of decisive victories, and in 1426 and 1427, the uprising reached its climax. The Battle of Tốt Động–Chúc Động in 1426 defeated a major Ming relief army, and in late 1427, after the decisive Battle of Chi Lăng–Xương Giang, the remaining Ming garrison surrendered.
What followed was unusual for the era. Lê Lợi chose not to humiliate the defeated Ming forces. Instead, he provided the retreating Chinese army with supplies, horses, and ships for their journey home. It was designed to preserve future diplomatic relations. In 1428, he formally proclaimed the Lê dynasty, restoring Vietnamese independence after 20 years of occupation.
The Lam Sơn uprising is remembered in Vietnam as a founding national story. Lê Lợi remains one of the country’s most revered historical figures, and the legend of the restored sword at Hoàn Kiếm Lake in Hanoi (where he is said to have returned a magical sword to a golden turtle after the victory) is part of Vietnamese cultural identity to this day.
1486–1487: Stability and Discovery
The 1486 Fire Horse year saw Europe emerging from one of its bloodiest periods. In England, the Wars of the Roses, a 30-year dynastic conflict between the Houses of Lancaster and York, had finally been settled by Henry VII’s victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth of York in January 1486 united the two warring houses and established the Tudor dynasty.
This was more than a royal wedding. It was a political settlement that ended a generation of civil war, usurpation, and instability. Henry VII proved to be a shrewd administrator who rebuilt the Crown’s finances, reduced the power of the nobility through legal and financial mechanisms rather than force, and laid the foundations for one of England’s most consequential dynasties. His son, Henry VIII, and granddaughter, Elizabeth I, would change England’s religious, cultural, and geopolitical identity.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, the Portuguese were pushing the boundaries of the known world. In 1487, King João II appointed Bartolomeu Dias to lead an expedition south along the African coast to find a sea route to the Indian Ocean. Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in early 1488, becoming the first European to do so. He didn’t reach India (his crew forced him to turn back), but the route was now proven. A decade later, Vasco da Gama followed Dias’s path and reached Calicut in India, opening the sea trade routes that would transform global commerce and shift the centre of economic power toward maritime European nations.
1546–1547: New Tsars and Dead Kings
On 16 January 1547, Ivan IV was crowned as the first Tsar of Russia in a ceremony at the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow. He was 16 years old. The title “Tsar” (derived from Caesar) was a deliberate claim to imperial legitimacy, positioning Moscow as the successor to both the Byzantine Empire and Rome. Ivan’s early reign was marked by genuine reform: he convened the first Zemsky Sobor (a national assembly), revised the legal code, reorganised the military, and significantly expanded Russia’s territory, including the conquests of Kazan and Astrakhan. His later years earned him the name “Ivan the Terrible” for the oprichnina, a campaign of domestic terror that devastated the Russian boyar class. But the centralised state he built would endure.
In the same year, two of Europe’s most powerful monarchs died within weeks of each other. Henry VIII of England died on 28 January 1547, ending a reign that had cut England from the Catholic Church, dissolved the monasteries, and altered the relationship between the Crown and religion. His legacy was a country in religious turmoil, with a nine-year-old heir (Edward VI) and decades of instability still to come.
Francis I of France died on 31 March 1547, closing a reign defined by Renaissance patronage, the Italian Wars, and a long rivalry with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Francis had invited Leonardo da Vinci to France and built the foundations of the French Renaissance, but he also left behind mounting debts as well as unresolved religious tensions that would erupt into the French Wars of Religion within a generation.
1606–1607: The New World Order
The year 1606 opened with one of the most dramatic trials in English history. On 27 January, Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators were tried for the Gunpowder Plot, the failed attempt to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. The plot, hatched by a group of English Catholics frustrated by continued persecution under James I, aimed to assassinate the King and much of the Protestant establishment in a single explosion.
Fawkes was executed on 31 January 1606. What happened after changed English politics. Laws against Catholics became even stricter, and the event became part of English national identity (the yearly Bonfire Night is still celebrated). More generally, the Gunpowder Plot strengthened Protestant control in England and deepened the religious divisions that would later lead to the English Civil War.
In the same year, the Virginia Company received its royal charter from James I, authorising the establishment of colonies in North America. The first permanent English settlement, Jamestown, was founded in Virginia in May 1607. The colony nearly failed multiple times (the “Starving Time” of 1609-1610 killed the majority of settlers), but it survived and became the template for English colonisation of North America.
Also in 1606, the Dutch ship Duyfken, under the command of Willem Janszoon, made the first known European landing in Australia, landing on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula. It would be another 164 years before James Cook mapped the east coast, but the first European visit to the southern continent had happened.
Three events in two years: the end of a Catholic conspiracy in England, the beginning of English America, and the first European sighting of the Australian continent. Each is a significant event in the fabric of modern history.
1666–1667: The Great Fire and Plague
London in the mid-1660s was under siege from nature itself.
The Great Plague of 1665 killed about 100,000 people in London, around a quarter of the city’s population. Lists of deaths were published every week, showing the extent of the problem. The rich escaped to the countryside. The poor, who could not leave, died in their homes, which were boarded up and marked with red crosses.
Then, on 2 September 1666, a fire started in a bakery on Pudding Lane. Over the next four days, it burned down 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and most of the buildings in the City of London, including the old St Paul’s Cathedral. The fire left about 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 residents without homes.
The destruction, although catastrophic, was also a kind of “cleansing”. The plague, which had been concentrated in the densely packed medieval streets and timber-framed buildings, effectively ended after the fire. The rebuilding effort, overseen by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke among others, replaced the medieval city with wider streets, brick and stone construction, and improved sanitation. Wren’s new St Paul’s Cathedral, completed in 1710, became one of London’s defining landmarks and a symbol of the city’s resilience.
The “Double Catastrophe” of plague and fire was London’s destruction and rebirth compressed into two years. The Fire Horse burned the old city down. What rose from the ashes was the foundation of modern London.
1786–1787: Revolutions and Nature’s Fury
In the newly independent United States, the excitement of defeating Britain was turning into a crisis over how to run the country. The Articles of Confederation, the first attempt at a national government, created a central government so weak it could not collect taxes, control trade, or maintain a regular army.
In 1786, the cracks became visible. In western Massachusetts, Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, led a rebellion of indebted farmers who were losing their properties to aggressive tax collection and debt enforcement. Shays’ Rebellion was relatively small in military terms, but its political impact was enormous. It demonstrated that the new nation’s government was incapable of maintaining order or responding to grievances. George Washington, in retirement at Mount Vernon, wrote in a famous letter to James Madison dated November 5, 1786, that the republic was on the verge of anarchy.
The rebellion catalysed the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, where delegates, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin, drafted the United States Constitution. The document that emerged, with its system of checks and balances and federal authority, replaced the failing Articles and became the foundation of American governance. Without Shays’ Rebellion exposing the weakness of the existing system, the political will for such a radical overhaul may not have existed.
1846–1847: Expansion and Famine
In May 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico after a series of border fights in Texas. The Mexican-American War was, in many ways, a fight to take land. Over the next two years, US forces took Mexico City, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) gave about half of Mexico’s land to the United States, including what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California in January 1848, just nine days before the treaty was signed, sparked the Gold Rush and accelerated changes in the American West.
At the same time, the Great Famine of Ireland, caused by the potato blight that destroyed the staple crop of the Irish poor, killed roughly one million people between 1845 and 1852 and forced another million to emigrate. The British government’s response was inadequate and callous. The famine reshaped Irish society permanently: Ireland’s population, which had been over 8 million before the famine, would not return to that level (and as of today, the Republic of Ireland’s population remains below it). The Irish diaspora created by the famine, particularly in the United States, Canada, and Australia, became one of the most significant migration events of the 19th century.
1906–1907: Redefining Disaster
At 5:12 AM on 18 April 1906, a massive earthquake struck San Francisco. The tremor itself lasted less than a minute, but the fires that followed burned for three days, destroying over 80% of the city. Roughly 3,000 people were killed, and more than half the city’s population of 400,000 was left homeless. The rebuilding of San Francisco became a defining story of American resilience, with the city largely reconstructed within a decade.
The following year, the Panic of 1907, triggered by a failed attempt to corner the copper market, caused a cascading bank run that threatened to collapse the American financial system. J.P. Morgan personally intervened, organising a consortium of bankers to shore up failing institutions. The crisis exposed the fragility of a financial system without a central bank or a lender of last resort. The direct result was the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, the institution that still governs American monetary policy today.
1966–1967: Ideology and Middle East Transformation
In Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War got much worse. By the end of 1966, the US had almost 400,000 troops in Vietnam, and the bombing of North Vietnam had grown much stronger. The war was becoming the main political and social issue for a whole generation, leading to protests that would change American politics and culture.
In June 1967, the Six-Day War completely changed the borders of the Middle East. Israel attacked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan first, and in just six days took over the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The land changes from those six days are still at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict almost 60 years later. The war made Israel the strongest military power in the region and set up the political map that shapes the Middle East today.
2026: The Pattern Repeats
Now here we are again. Bing Wu, 2026. And the pattern has already started.
The conflict between the US, Israel, and Iran feels like just the kind of sudden change this cycle has brought before. Iran’s gradual wear-down of its enemies over time aligns with the long-term struggles that often occur in these periods. The risk of the conflict getting bigger, possibly involving Europe, Russia, and China, is real. The similarities to 1967 are worrying.
I want to be clear: I’m not saying Chinese astrology controls world events. What I am saying is that history, over a thousand years and across many cultures, shows a pattern of significant stress, sudden change, and transformation during the two-year periods of the Fire Horse and Fire Goat. Whether the reason is astrology or just cycles, the lesson is the same.
Be prepared.
Navigating the Inferno
So what does “be prepared” actually look like?
Move with intention, not panic.
The Fire Horse moves quickly. Things are happening faster and faster, and it is natural to want to react to everything. Try not to do that. Panic leads to bad choices. The events happening around the world are shaking things up, yes, but they are also signs. Notice what they are telling you about where the world is going, and act based on that.
Let go of what no longer works.
Every single historical example above has one thing in common: the old structure failed, and something new replaced it. The Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. The Northern Song court. The Yuan dynasty. The Articles of Confederation. The medieval city of London.
If something in your life, like your job, your money plan, or your beliefs about how things work, is only continuing because it has always been that way, this is the year it will be challenged. It is better to change by choice than to have change forced on you.
Build what can survive the furnace.
As I wrote in my previous article: 真金不怕红炉火. Real gold does not fear the furnace. Focus on building things that can withstand extreme pressure. Skills that remain valuable regardless of economic conditions. Relationships grounded in trust rather than convenience. Financial positions that can absorb shocks.
This applies to nations as much as it applies to individuals. The civilisations that emerged strongest from these periods were those that had invested in real capacity, competent governance, genuine social cohesion, and systems designed to endure extreme shocks.
Take care of each other.
The Horse archetype is independent by nature, but history has shown that those who survive these periods lean into community. London was rebuilt because its citizens rebuilt together. The American Constitution was written by a group of people who disagreed on almost everything but recognised that the alternative was collapse.
If there’s one takeaway from a thousand years of Fire Horse and Fire Goat history, it’s this: extreme pressure reveals one’s true nature. In governance, in institutions, and in people. The heat will come. What matters is what we do with it.
Fire as Purification and Hope
I’ll end with the same conclusion as my previous article.
Fire doesn’t only destroy. It reveals. It shows what is solid and what is fragile, what is real and what is fake. The Fire Horse year is a stress test for the world and for each of us individually.
History shows that when systems fracture, people rise. From the ashes of London came a modern city. From the failure of the Articles of Confederation came the US Constitution. From the fall of the Yuan came the Ming Dynasty. From the devastation of 1906 came the Federal Reserve and a new San Francisco.
We can’t always control the fire. But we can choose whether to be consumed by it or to build something from what it leaves behind. Stay safe. Remain grounded. And trust that careful, sincere actions will lead toward a more truthful and resilient future.
The cycle turns for a thousand years. But on the other side of every Fire Horse, there has always been renewal.
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