The Rooster is paired with you, the tenth earthly branch, whose double-hour runs from five to seven in the evening and whose phase is metal. The bird is the announcer of dawn, and in Chinese tradition the crowing of the cock at daybreak is what disperses the ghosts and harmful influences of the night, which gives the rooster a protective and apotropaic role in folk practice: cock images were placed at doors, and the bird features in exorcistic and funerary rites. Its Chinese name, ji, is a homophone of the word for auspicious, which reinforces the association. The traits given to the sign, punctuality, forthrightness, confidence, diligence and a taste for display, follow both from the bird's timekeeping and from its conspicuous plumage and readiness to fight.
The rooster's apotropaic, ghost-dispelling role at dawn connects it to a broader family of Chinese New Year and funerary customs in which loud noise, firecrackers chief among them, is used for the same purpose of driving off malevolent spirits, so that the rooster's traditional crowing and the deliberately noisy modern celebration of the New Year serve, in the folk-religious logic of the tradition, functionally the same protective purpose even though one is an animal's natural behaviour and the other a manufactured explosive.