The Great Race: the story behind the Chinese zodiac, and where it really comes from

The Jade Emperor, who runs Heaven the way a very senior civil servant runs a ministry, decides that people need a better way to keep track of the years. His solution is a contest. Every animal is invited to his palace, there is a wide, fast river in the way, and the first twelve across will each have a year named after them, in the order they arrive.

The Rat and the Cat are clever and poor swimmers, so they ask the Ox for a ride. The Ox, strong and good-natured and not built for suspicion, agrees. Halfway across the Rat pushes the Cat into the water. As the Ox wades up the far bank, the Rat leaps off its head and reaches the Emperor first. The Ox, who did the swimming, comes second, which tells you most of what the story thinks about effort and reward.

The Tiger is third, soaked and annoyed, having fought the current the whole way. The Rabbit is fourth, having hopped from stone to stone and then grabbed a floating log. The Dragon, who could have flown over everyone, is only fifth: it stopped to make rain for a village in a drought, and on the way it saw the Rabbit's log drifting and blew it ashore. Then comes the Horse, galloping, and coiled around one of its hooves is the Snake, which drops off at the line and takes sixth while the startled Horse rears back into seventh.

The Goat, the Monkey and the Rooster arrive together on a raft the Rooster found, with the Monkey and the Goat hauling the weeds out of its way, and they are seated eighth, ninth and tenth. The Dog, the best swimmer of them all, is eleventh, because it could not resist a bath. And just as the Emperor is about to close the gate there is a grunt from the bushes: the Pig, who stopped to eat, fell asleep, and woke up just in time to be last.

The Cat, depending on who is telling it, drowns, or crawls out too late. Either way it has hated the Rat ever since, which is the story's other job: to explain why cats chase rats.

The race is a story about a list, and the list is real. Each place on it is one of the twelve Earthly Branches, the counting signs that name years, months and the twelve two-hour blocks of the day. The animals' finishing order is the branches' order, and the hours are the two-hour blocks each branch names on the traditional Chinese clock.

Every version agrees that the Rat is to blame and disagrees about the crime. In the English telling the Rat pushes the Cat off the Ox mid-river. In a version told in China, retold by Guangming Daily, the Cat, afraid of oversleeping, asks the Rat to wake it on the morning of the selection, and the Rat simply does not, so the Cat misses the roll call. Ed Young's picture book Cat and Rat (1995) makes them friends before the betrayal, which is crueler and better storytelling.

The dull answer is probably the true one: there were no house cats in China to include. A Peking University team led by Luo Shujin, reading ancient DNA from feline bones, found that the small cats living around Chinese farms until about AD 220 were wild leopard cats, and that the earliest domestic cat, from the Tongwan City site in Shaanxi, dates to AD 706 to 883, in the Tang dynasty. By then the twelve animals had been settled for well over half a millennium. The cat did not lose the race. It had not yet arrived in the country.

Vietnam, characteristically, fixed the problem itself. Its zodiac has a cat in the fourth seat, where China has the rabbit, and a water buffalo where China has the ox. The usual explanation is the sound of the branch name, mao, close to the Vietnamese word for cat, though as a Vietnamese cultural consultant told NPR, nobody knows when the switch happened, and older Vietnamese texts still have the rabbit.

The host changes. In some versions it is not the Jade Emperor but the Buddha, and there is no race at all: before leaving the world he invites every animal to a farewell banquet, only twelve come, and he names the years for them in the order they arrived. The contest changes too, from a swim across a river to a plain first-come roll call at court. What never changes is the order of the twelve, because the order is the one thing the story was made to explain.

That looseness is itself the clue. A tale with a fixed text and a known author holds its shape; this one has the shape of a story passed from grandparent to child, and the details drift with the teller. The Jade Emperor page makes the same point about the god's other popular jobs.

Before there were animals there was counting. The twelve branches, together with the ten Heavenly Stems, were already a complete working system on Shang dynasty oracle bones, more than three thousand years ago, and they were letters in a code, not creatures. Our page on the stems and branches has all twenty-two. The question is when someone hung an animal on each branch, and the answer came out of the ground.

In 1975 archaeologists opened tomb 11 at Shuihudi, in Hubei, the grave of a Qin dynasty man buried in 217 BCE, and found about 1,200 bamboo slips. Among them were two daybooks, almanacs for choosing lucky and unlucky days. One chapter, "Thieves," tells you what the thief looks like from the day the thing went missing. On a zi day, "the rat: the thief has a pointed mouth and sparse whiskers." On a chou day, the ox, and a thief with a big nose. It is a zodiac, built for catching burglars.

It is also not quite ours. A second Qin daybook with its own "Thieves" chapter, from a tomb at Fangmatan in Gansu dated to the end of the Warring States or the Qin, is much closer to the modern list but has its own oddities. Here is the line-up, branch by branch, as the scholars transcribe them, beside the first complete list in a book.

Read down the Shuihudi column and the race's finishing order starts to wobble. There is a deer where the horse should be, the horse is one seat late in the goat's place, an old ram sits where the dog now sits, and the dragon's seat has a thief described but no animal named. The pheasant and the ape are scholars' readings of words that, on the slip, say "water" and something like "ring." Fangmatan has a chicken in the snake's seat as well as in the rooster's, and its monkey is disputed: a Fudan University reading group reads the word as "stone." Han dynasty slips from Kongjiapo, in Hubei, still had "water," "jade stone" and "old fire" in some seats. The Rat, the Ox, the Tiger, the Rabbit and the Pig are the only animals who hold their places on all three lists.

The first complete set survives because a skeptic wanted to argue with it. Wang Chong, writing his Lunheng in the first century AD, quotes the theory that the animals fight because their branches' elements fight, names eleven of the pairs between the theory and his reply, and then demolishes the idea: if water beats fire, "why does the rat not chase the horse?" The twelfth, the dragon, turns up in a later chapter on poisons, in one line: chen is the dragon, si is the snake. From then on the list is ours. It has not changed in nineteen hundred years.

Here is where we have to be honest, because most retellings call the race "ancient" and none of them gives a date. We looked for one. The best evidence turned out to be the scholars who tried to explain the order and did not mention a race at all.

Around 1400, early in the Ming, a Hangzhou fortune-teller and bookworm named Wang Kui explained each seat by yin and yang: the rat goes with zi, the darkest point of the night, because it hides; the horse with wu, high noon, because it runs. A century and a half later the scholar Lang Ying went further and counted toes. Branches alternate yang and yin, he noted, and so do the animals' feet: five claws for the tiger, the dragon, the monkey and the dog, cloven hooves for the ox, the goat and the pig, a forked tongue for the snake. The rat is the clever one. It has four toes in front and five behind, even and odd, so it straddles yin and yang exactly as the zi hour straddles last night and this morning. That is why it is first.

Lang Ying also tells us what ordinary people said about the animals in his day, and it is not a race. "People say they took the incomplete ones," he writes, meaning every zodiac animal was chosen for lacking something, and he dismisses the idea; Wang Kui had dismissed it too. Two learned men, both collecting popular explanations of the order, both arguing with them, and neither mentions a river.

After that the trail goes cold. We found no datable text of the race before the twentieth century, and Wikipedia's own article on the zodiac carries a flag saying the origin of the folktale is missing. The race is told everywhere now, and English readers mostly meet it in picture books like Ed Young's. It may well be older in the mouths of grandparents than on paper; folktales usually are. But on the present evidence the cycle is at least twenty-two centuries old, and the story that explains it, as far as anything written shows, is closer to a hundred. That is the finding, and it is a better story than "ancient legend": the zodiac was so old that people had to make up a reason for it.