Year of the Rat

Years of the Rat

Each year runs from one Lunar New Year to the day before the next, as the Hong Kong Observatory’s conversion tables give them; the next Year of the Rat begins on 11 February 2032. The element comes from the year’s heavenly stem, so it changes with the last digit of the year: Wood for years ending in 4 and 5, Fire for 6 and 7, Earth for 8 and 9, Metal for 0 and 1, and Water for 2 and 3 (the five elements). Someone born in January or early February before that year’s Lunar New Year belongs to the previous animal: a child born on 20 January 2020 was born in the Year of the Pig, because the Year of the Rat began five days later. Some fortune-tellers count the change from the solar term Spring Commences (lichun, about 4 February) instead; the Observatory, and China’s national calendar standard of 2017, use the Lunar New Year.

Why is the rat first?

The story most often told is the race. Encyclopaedia Britannica records the common telling: the Jade Emperor, or in another version the Buddha, called the animals to a race to decide the order of the calendar, with a river to cross on the way. The rat, small and clever, rode across on the back of the ox and jumped off at the last moment to finish first. In a variant the rat forgot to wake the cat on the morning of the race, or pushed it off the ox’s back into the river, and legend says this is why cats hate rats.

Chinese scholars gave other reasons. A Ming writer, Li Changqing, quoted by Liu Xianting in the Qing, explained that heaven opens at the hour of zi, and the rat, a gnawing creature, gnaws it open in the middle of the night. Fan Guodong reports another explanation from historians: the branches alternate between yang and yin, and were matched with animals by the number of their toes, odd for yang and even for yin. The rat was thought to have four toes on its front feet and five on its back, both yin and yang at once, so it took the hour of zi, which falls between the two, and the first place.

The rat in Chinese folk custom

The rat is a pest in the granary and also a bringer of money in Chinese lore. The Qing writer Fang Junyi recorded a “money rat” in eastern Guangdong whose squeak sounds like coins being counted, and whose appearance was taken to mean happy news for the household; Yu Yue added that the squeak of an ordinary rat heard in the morning meant money lost, and in the evening money coming in. On the twenty-fifth day of the first month grain merchants kept the Granary Festival, and the granary god they honoured was the rat, the People’s Weekly writes; an old Beijing account calls him the lord who keeps the rats of the store. Lu Xun remembered a New Year print of “the mouse’s wedding” pinned up by his bed, its guests all pointed chins and thin legs in red shirts and green trousers. Old Chinese objects decorated with rats are few: the Victoria and Albert Museum, choosing a rat for its 2011 selection of zodiac animals, showed a teapot made at Jingdezhen in 2008.