Five Virtues of the Cock

A well-known Chinese formulation, transmitted in the Han Shi Waizhuan and repeated in later literature, credits the cock with five virtues: it wears a comb like a scholar's cap, so it has civil virtue; it has spurs, so it has martial virtue; it fights its enemies, so it has courage; it calls its hens to food it finds, so it has benevolence; and it never fails to announce the dawn, so it has trustworthiness. This is a moral reading of an animal rather than an astrological one, and it shows how the twelve signs sit inside a much wider body of Chinese animal symbolism from which the almanac tradition draws. The rooster belongs to the san he triad with the Ox and the Snake and stands opposite the Rabbit.

The Han Shi Waizhuan, an anecdotal commentary on the Book of Songs compiled in the Western Han dynasty and attributed to Han Ying, is one of several surviving Han-era texts that use animal behaviour as a vehicle for stating Confucian moral virtues directly, and the rooster's five virtues passage is among the most frequently anthologised examples of the genre in later Chinese moral and educational literature, still cited in modern popular writing on Chinese culture as a concise summary of Confucian civic virtue attached to an everyday farmyard animal.