Zodiac Stories & Legends

Legends and history: two different stories

There are two kinds of answer to the question "where do the twelve zodiac animals come from?", and this collection keeps them apart. The first kind is the folk tale. The best known is the Great Race, in which the Jade Emperor invites the animals to cross a river and their finishing places set the order of the zodiac. It is told in many versions: in most, the Rat wins by riding on the Ox and leaping ahead at the finish, the Dragon arrives fifth after stopping to help, and the Cat, left behind, never gets a place at all. These stories explain the order in a way that is easy to remember, and each one gives an animal a personality: clever, steady, brave, gentle.

The second kind of answer is history. The twelve animals match the twelve Earthly Branches, an ancient Chinese counting system used for years, months, days and the twelve two-hour periods of the day. Combined with the ten Heavenly Stems, the branches form the sixty-year cycle, which is why each animal year also has an element, such as the Fire Horse. Archaeology shows the animal list changed over time: bamboo slips from a Qin tomb at Shuihudi, sealed in 217 BCE, already record a cycle of animals, with a few differences from today's list, and the first surviving text to name exactly the twelve we use now is the Lunheng, written by Wang Chong in the first century CE. Our article Why are there 12 animals? gives the details and sources.

How to read these stories

Every story page says clearly when it is telling a legend, and gives sources when it describes history or culture. The legends are part of a living tradition shared across China and across Asia, including in Cambodia, where the same twelve animals name the years of the Khmer calendar, although the Khmer animal year begins at Khmer New Year in April rather than at Chinese New Year. If you know a version of a story that differs from ours, that is normal: these tales have always changed from teller to teller.