Rat in the Chinese Zodiac
A sourced guide to the Rat’s place at the start of the Chinese zodiac, its 子 branch, the Rat–Ox race story, and its wider life in art and language.
Reviewed
- Cycle position
- 1 of 12
- Earthly branch
- 子 Zǐ
- Sequence
- First of twelve · followed by Ox
Rat opens the familiar twelve-animal sequence. That first position is easy to remember through the zodiac race, but the animal has a much longer and less tidy cultural life—in language, satire, ceramics, folklore, and New Year imagery.
Historical context
A name older than its zodiac role
The character 鼠 (shǔ) names the small rodents that English divides more readily into “rats” and “mice.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that rats and mice were traditionally treated as the same animal in East Asia, which is why English museum labels and festival materials may use either word for this zodiac sign.
Written evidence for the word is older than the animal’s place in the zodiac: an early form of 鼠 appears on a thirteenth-century BCE oracle bone. Later objects made the zodiac animal visible in other ways. A porcelain rat figure produced at Jingdezhen in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, for example, belongs to a material history very different from a modern horoscope column.
Traditional interpretation
How Rat reaches first place
In a widely told race story, Rat crosses the river on Ox’s back and jumps ahead at the finish. The episode gives listeners a compact explanation for two adjacent places in the sequence: Rat first, Ox second. It also makes an animal smaller than the others a memorable opening character.
The race is a narrative explanation, not a dated account of how the calendar was invented. Other tellings use a heavenly invitation rather than a river race, and details about the organizer and the animals’ actions change. The stable information is the order itself and Rat’s pairing with the earthly branch 子 (Zǐ).
Modern practice
More than one symbolic reading
Rat imagery can praise quick thinking, food gathering, or abundance, but it can also criticize greed and exploitation. The classical poem commonly translated as “Big Rat,” for example, uses the animal in political satire. These meanings coexist; there is no single positive label that explains every appearance of a rat in Chinese art or writing.
During a Rat year, museums, families, schools, and public celebrations may bring the animal forward in decorations and educational programs. That seasonal visibility renews an old symbol in the present. It does not turn a birth-year label into a reliable account of someone’s character.
Sources & further reading
- Celebrating the Year of the RatThe Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Zodiac figure: ratThe Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads — RatHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
- Legend of the twelve Zodiac AnimalsInternational Dunhuang Programme, British Library