Earthly branch 1 of 12
The Rat
子Zi
The animal is the memorable half of a pairing whose other half does the work. The branch 子 is a position in a twelve-part cycle that names an hour, a month, a direction and a phase — and the rat was fitted to it, not the other way round.
- Double hour23:00–00:59
- DirectionNorth
- Fixed phaseWater
One position, four scales
What 子 names
One branch marks a place in four different cycles at once. These are the same position counted in different units.
- 01
- 02
- 03
- 04
Geometry of the branch circle
Its fixed relations
Three relations are decided by position alone: the branch opposite, the branch it pairs with, and the two it forms a triangle with. None of them is a judgement about people.
Folklore of the sequence
The Rat in the Great Race
The folk tale that explains the order of the twelve — told, as it usually is, about an order the calendar had already fixed centuries before any animal was attached to it.
Place1of 12
Too small to cross the river, the Rat talked its way onto the Ox's back and rode the whole way in comfort — then sprang from its shoulders at the bank and landed first. The same tale has the Rat persuading the Cat to sleep through the start, which is why no cat is among the twelve.
The twelve branches appear on Shang oracle bones, where they name days; the animals are attached to them much later. The race is how the tradition accounts for an inherited order rather than how that order came about. The full ordering legend
Five meetings in sixty years
The five Rat pillars
A branch meets only five of the ten stems, because stems and branches advance together and their parities stay locked. That is why there are sixty pairs rather than a hundred and twenty.
Move around the circle