Year of the Rooster

Years of the Rooster

Each Rooster year begins on the Lunar New Year and ends the day before the next one, as the Hong Kong Observatory’s Gregorian–Lunar calendar conversion tables give the dates.

Someone born in January or early February belongs to the previous animal if they were born before that year’s Lunar New Year. The Observatory, and China’s national calendar standard of 2017, change the year on Lunar New Year’s Day; fortune tellers, the Observatory notes, tend to change it at the solar term Spring Commences, about 4 February, which is why some tables give different dates. The element changes with the last digit of the year, because it comes from the year’s heavenly stem, and the Huainanzi gives the stems their elements: jia and yi are wood, bing and ding fire, wu and ji earth, geng and xin metal, ren and gui water. In Western years that makes 4 and 5 Wood, 6 and 7 Fire, 8 and 9 Earth, 0 and 1 Metal, 2 and 3 Water; the five elements page explains the sixty-year cycle they make with the animals.

The five virtues of the cock

Han Ying’s Han shi wai zhuan, a commentary on the Classic of Songs, gives the cock five virtues, in Taiwan Panorama’s translation: “Wearing a hat like a scholar, it is scholarly; with claws that pierce the flesh, it is martial; attacking when confronted by an enemy, it is bold; calling out when it finds food, it is benevolent; standing guard at night without fail, it is trustworthy.” The philosophers made the bird a lesson. Mozi contrasted the cock, which crows only to announce the day, with frogs and flies that make noise all day; Zhuangzi told of a fighting cock trained until it stood like a bird carved in wood, and other cocks ran from it.

The rooster and the dog

The rooster stands next to the dog in the cycle, and Chinese idioms put the two together. Taiwan Panorama’s Year of the Dog article lists “even chickens and dogs are not left in peace” for general turmoil and “chickens flying and dogs jumping” for panic, and notes the custom in Taiwan of shaping “mother hens and puppy dogs” from rice dough at the winter solstice. Matchmakers were wary of the pair. A popular print warns that “the gold cock weeps at the sight of the dog”, and the saying “no peace between chicken and dog” was used against such a marriage.

The rooster in the race

Encyclopaedia Britannica retells the popular legend of a race in which the first twelve animals across a river won places in the calendar in the order they finished; the goat, the monkey and the rooster came in together after helping one another across. A Taiwanese rhyme recorded by Taiwan Panorama gives the bird the line “tenth the chicken, crowing reveille”.

Roosters in art

The National Palace Museum’s Ming painting Chickens shows a cock and hen with three chicks under orange daylilies, the daylily standing for the mother, and the museum notes that hen, chicks and flowers together express affection for one’s mother. In a Rooster year, Taiwan Panorama reported in 1993, the bird appeared on windows, as toys and as lanterns. The bronze rooster head from the zodiac water clock at the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, looted in 1860, is still missing, CGTN reported in 2023.