Rooster

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.

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.