Year of the Rat: Dates, Meaning and Why the Rat Comes First

Look up your Chinese zodiac animal, discover that you are a Rat, and you may feel a small flicker of disappointment. There are twelve animals in the cycle, and you appear to have drawn the one that gets into the grain store.

Before you resign yourself to that, it is worth knowing how much of the Rat's image problem belongs to English rather than to Chinese. The character at the center of it all, 鼠 (shǔ), does not divide rats from mice the way English does, and it never picked up the sense that makes calling someone "a rat" sting.

The reason the Rat comes first, meanwhile, has almost nothing to do with the famous race. It is a fact about the Chinese calendar, and it is older than the animals themselves.

This guide covers the dates, the language, the folk customs and the astrology, noting as it goes which parts are documented history and which arrived much more recently. Separating those layers is what makes the Rat one of the most rewarding signs in the Chinese zodiac to explore.

01 When is the Year of the Rat?

The next Year of the Rat (鼠年, shǔnián) runs from February 11, 2032 to January 30, 2033. It is a Water Rat year, written 壬子 (rénzǐ) in stem-and-branch notation, and the first since 1972.

The dates below come from the Hong Kong Observatory's Gregorian–lunar conversion tables. The 立春 (lìchūn, "start of spring") column matters more than you might expect, and the next section explains why.

Both gaps — twelve years between Rat years, sixty between Water Rat years — come out of the same machinery. Years in the Chinese calendar are labeled by pairing ten heavenly stems with twelve earthly branches, the system known as 干支 (gānzhī).

The two wheels turn together, one notch each per year, so the pairs do not repeat for sixty years. The animal is attached to the branch and returns every twelve years, while the element is attached to the stem, which is why the Water Rat returns only every sixty.

I was born in January — am I really a Rat?

This is the single most common way zodiac tables go wrong, and it catches anyone born in January or early February.

Two conventions compete over when a zodiac year begins. Popular practice starts it at Lunar New Year, while traditional four pillars fortune-telling, or 八字 (bāzì), starts it at 立春 (lìchūn), the solar term falling on February 4 or 5.

Chinese academics and folklorists are themselves split on which is correct. A mathematical study of the Chinese calendar gives the clearest illustration, and it happens to use a Rat year.

Mozart is the classic casualty. Lists call him a Rat because 1756 was a Rat year, but the Rat year did not begin until January 31 and he was born on January 27, which makes him a Pig either way.

Is being born in a Rat year bad news?

The short answer is no, and the language itself is the evidence.

Open 漢典 (Hàndiǎn), or any other of the online Chinese dictionaries worth keeping bookmarked, at 鼠 (shǔ) and the zodiac meaning is a numbered sense of its own, separate from the figurative "petty person" and "cowardly." Chinese keeps the animal insult and the calendar label in different drawers.

In folk art the rat is festive rather than shameful, and Korea's national folk museum attaches fecundity, wealth and the north to the same first sign.

What is true is that the Rat carries less glamour than the Dragon, and that gap is measurable, since Chinese Dragon years show birth spikes of hundreds of thousands. That is a fact about the Dragon, though, rather than about the Rat.

02 Why is the Rat first in the Chinese zodiac?

The answer lies with 子 (zǐ) rather than with a race. Stem-and-branch notation was used to count days in the earliest Chinese writing we have, with a complete cycle of sixty signs appearing in Shang oracle-bone inscriptions by around 1200 BCE.

The animals were added later, to match branch names that already existed. So the Rat is first because it is attached to 子 (zǐ), the first branch, and that list was never ordered by reference to animals at all.

Every explanation of why the rat specifically — the midnight hour, the toe counts, the great race — is a later attempt to make sense of a pairing that had already been fixed.

The archaeology backs this up. Qin dynasty bamboo slips from a tomb dated to 217 BCE, excavated at Shuihudi in Hubei, carry a divination manual whose branch-and-animal list is recognizably the zodiac, though not quite.

子 (zǐ) is paired with 鼠 (shǔ) exactly as it still is, yet the horse sits in the wrong slot, 酉 (yǒu) has a pheasant rather than a rooster, and 辰 (chén) is blank. Four slots were still in flux while the Rat was already settled — just what you would expect from animals fitted onto an older skeleton.

Those Qin animals are also day animals, used to guess a thief's appearance from the day of the theft. A birth-year zodiac in the modern sense is first attested only in the fifth or sixth century CE.

The midnight rat is a case in point. The double hour 子时 (zǐshí), 11pm to 1am, is real enough, but the idea that it belongs to the rat because rats are busiest then is first traced to a Ming dynasty text — while the earliest surviving justification, in Wang Chong's first-century CE Lunheng, argues from the five elements instead.

What about the Great Race?

In the story, the Jade Emperor calls the animals to a race and the first twelve to arrive are given the years. The Rat cannot swim well, so it crosses the river on the ox's back and leaps off at the bank to arrive first, shoving the cat into the water on the way in some versions.

It is a wonderful story, told all over East Asia, and there is every reason to enjoy it. It belongs to folklore rather than to the documentary record, though, and no source we consulted dates it or names its earliest recorded version.

The pre-modern Chinese texts that try to explain the order — one from the Song dynasty, two from the Ming — reason from five-element theory, from yin and yang, and in one case from counting the animals' toes. Not one mentions a race, a river or the Jade Emperor.

Why is there no cat in the Chinese zodiac?

Here the evidence is unusually good, and the answer comes from archaeology rather than from a story: domestic cats had probably not arrived in China yet.

Ancient DNA research from Peking University, published in 2025, concludes that the domestic cat most likely reached China no earlier than about 1,400 years ago. For the roughly 3,500 years before that, the small cats living alongside Chinese farmers were leopard cats, a different species entirely.

Line that up against the Shuihudi slips and the point makes itself. The roster was already being written down in 217 BCE, so the cat was not left out of the zodiac — it simply was not there.

Vietnam's zodiac does have a Cat, in the Rabbit's fourth position. The usual explanation is phonetic, since the Sino-Vietnamese reading of 卯 (mǎo) resembles mèo, "cat," though that is a plausible conjecture rather than a documented cause.

03 The Rat in Chinese: 鼠 (shǔ), 老鼠 (lǎoshǔ) and 耗子 (hàozi)

This is the part of the Rat's story that will do the most for your Chinese, because its vocabulary is unusually rich and quietly irregular.

The zodiac says 鼠年 (shǔnián) and 属鼠 (shǔ shǔ, "to belong to the Rat"). If a rodent runs across your kitchen floor, though, you would not shout 鼠 (shǔ) — you would shout 老鼠 (lǎoshǔ).

The zodiac is using the older, shorter word that everyday Chinese has largely replaced. Research based on the Chinese dialect atlas dates 老鼠 (lǎoshǔ) to the Tang dynasty and finds it dominant across 79% of surveyed dialect points.

The 老 (lǎo) here is not "old." It is a prefix whose job is word formation, turning a one-syllable word into a two-syllable one, as it also does in 老虎 (lǎohǔ, tiger) and 老鹰 (lǎoyīng, eagle).

Then there is 耗子 (hàozi), which learner resources usually file as "the northern word," and that is not quite right — data drawn from across China's dialect map puts it in two separate wings, the northeast and the southwest.

Its etymology is the best small fact in the subject. 耗子 (hàozi) descends from a Ming dynasty tax term, 鼠耗 (shǔhào), a grain surcharge that notionally covered what the rats ate.

The tax was named after the rat, and then the rat took its name back from the tax.

What Chinese idioms say about rats

Chinese has something in the order of a hundred four-character idioms (成语, chéngyǔ) built on 鼠 (shǔ), and those in general use are uniformly unflattering. Every idiom below was checked against 漢典 (Hàndiǎn) or Taiwan's Ministry of Education idiom dictionary.

Two are routinely mistranslated. 首鼠两端 (shǒu shǔ liǎng duān) means hesitating between two options rather than "two-faced," and 投鼠忌器 (tóu shǔ jì qì) is about restraint rather than squeamishness — you want to throw something at the rat, but the rat is next to your good crockery.

The oldest layer is 硕鼠 (shuò shǔ), "the big rat," and it is political. The Shijing poem of that name tells the big rat to stop eating the speaker's millet, and the rat in question is the tax collector.

Is it the Year of the Rat or the Year of the Mouse?

The answer is both. English splits rats from mice, while Chinese does not, because 鼠 (shǔ) is not a species name but a shape-and-habits label with remarkable reach.

It gives us 松鼠 (sōngshǔ, squirrel), 仓鼠 (cāngshǔ, hamster), 田鼠 (tiánshǔ, vole) and 鼠标 (shǔbiāo, computer mouse), along with 袋鼠 (dàishǔ), which is a kangaroo and therefore not a rodent at all. That breadth is the character's oldest recorded definition, since the Han dynasty Shuowen Jiezi — the foundational work of Chinese character etymology — glosses it as the general name for burrowing creatures.

Chinese gets specific when it needs to, with 大鼠 (dàshǔ) and 小鼠 (xiǎoshǔ), but the default word covers both. Even the Hong Kong Observatory's English tables call it "year of the Mouse."

Two pronunciation traps

属鼠 (shǔ shǔ) is two different characters sharing a syllable and a tone, so the same sandhi applies, giving something like shú shǔ. Note the reading too: in the zodiac sense 属 is shǔ rather than zhǔ, and 我属鼠 (wǒ shǔ shǔ) is the ordinary way to say "I was born in the Year of the Rat."

04 老鼠嫁女 (lǎoshǔ jià nǚ): the wedding of the mouse's daughter

Here is a whole Chinese folk observance about rats that English-language zodiac pages rarely mention.

老鼠嫁女 (lǎoshǔ jià nǚ, "the rat marries off her daughter") is one of the most widely spread folk customs in China and one of the most frequently painted subjects in New Year woodblock prints, current across both the Yellow and Yangtze river basins.

The date is where it gets interesting, because there isn't a single one. County records put it on the tenth day of the first lunar month in Pingyao, Zixing and Zhenjiang, the seventeenth in Ningyuan, and the twenty-fifth in parts of the north, where it coincides with the granary festival.

Every one of those dates falls inside the same crowded stretch of the first lunar month that also carries the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth, when the New Year period is still in full swing.

What people do is more consistent. In most accounts the household keeps quiet and leaves the lamps unlit, so as not to offend the rats on their big night, and puts out salt, rice, cakes and sweets.

The folk logic is summed up in a line worth remembering: disturb them for one night and they will disturb you for a year.

The prints are the best image in the whole subject. The procession is drawn as a full human wedding — bride in red in a flower sedan chair, groom mounted, musicians and gift-carriers in train — with a cat lying in wait along the route, and one version even shows the cat accepting a bribe.

As for what the custom was for, the folk-art historian Wang Shucun offered a practical reading. The weeks after 立春 (lìchūn) are when rats breed and stored grain is at risk, so the prints, the granary-filling festival 填仓节 (tiáncāngjié) and the unlit lamps together got the children to bed early, lured the rats out and let the cats do the rest.

The Rat as a symbol of children

The well-documented positive thread in rat symbolism is not abundance or full granaries, since 硕鼠 (shuò shǔ) is the rat eating the peasant's millet. The positive thread is children, and the logic is a pun.

The Rat's branch, 子 (zǐ), is the same character as "child," while melons and grapes are prized in decorative art for being full of seeds, 籽 (zǐ), a homophone. Rodent plus melon therefore reads as 多子 (duō zǐ), "many offspring."

The imperial example is unambiguous: the Ming emperor Xuanzong painted Bitter Gourd and Rats in 1427, and scholarship reads it as a prayer for the safe birth of an heir.

One correction is worth making, because the point is often stated the other way around. The canonical grapes motif pairs a squirrel with grapes rather than a rat, and the rat's own version of the rebus uses the gourd.

05 What the tradition actually says about Rat personality

You probably already know the list: quick-witted, adaptable, thrifty, sociable, observant, a little acquisitive and a little prone to gossip. It turns up in American zodiac handbooks from the 1970s and in Chinese popular sources today in strikingly similar words, which makes it a real cultural object — a widely shared stereotype.

What it is not is classical doctrine. Sanming Tonghui, the great Ming compendium of Chinese fate calculation, has a whole chapter on the branches and the zodiac animals, which is exactly where a personality-by-birth-animal doctrine would live if the tradition had one.

It contains none. The chapter argues instead about why each animal is paired with each branch, and it reads character from configurations across the whole chart rather than from the birth animal.

Practitioners today say much the same: in four pillars reckoning your birth-year animal is only one of eight characters, and personality is read from the chart as a whole with the day pillar as the reference point.

The modern English profile also comes from a hybrid source, since the publisher of the standard 1979 handbook describes it as combining the Eastern lunar calendar with Western solar-based astrology across 144 relationship combinations. A twelve-by-twelve grid of everything is a newspaper-horoscope format rather than a classical one.

None of which is a reason not to enjoy the trait list. It simply belongs to popular culture rather than to the classical tradition, and knowing which is which makes both more interesting.

06 Rat compatibility: the five classical relations

Compatibility is the part of zodiac lore with the deepest classical roots. The Rat's relations with the other signs come from five named relationships between the earthly branches, each with its own chapter in Sanming Tonghui and the same membership in Ming texts as in modern reference works.

What it is not is a prediction about real relationships. It describes traditional astrological relations, and that is how it is best read.

Popular lists usually add the Rooster 酉 (yǒu) to the avoid column by way of a sixth relation, 相破 (xiāngpò), which has no chapter of its own in Sanming Tonghui and is less well attested.

Otherwise the popular 宜配 (yípèi) and 忌配 (jìpèi) lists map exactly onto those classical relations. Compatibility, in other words, is classical astrology in modern clothing, in a way that the personality profile is not.

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07 Lucky numbers, colors and directions

There is a real and explainable tradition connecting the Rat to north and to black or dark blue, and it runs through the five elements (五行, wǔxíng). 子 (zǐ) is the water branch, water is the north, water's color is black, and in the Hetu numerology water's numbers are one and six.

The lucky numbers, colors and directions offered on popular astrology sites are a different matter, and they contradict one another flatly, with one site's lucky direction appearing on another's list of directions to avoid. Where the element correspondences have a documented logic behind them, those lists mostly do not.

08 Your 本命年 (běnmìngnián) in 2032

If you were born in a Rat year, 2032 is your 本命年 (běnmìngnián), the year every twelfth when the cycle returns to your own sign.

Popular belief holds that this is an inauspicious year rather than a lucky one, because you "offend 太岁 (tàisuì)," the star-deity who presides over the year in China's older religious traditions. The folk formula runs that when Taisui sits overhead, if there is not joy there will be trouble.

The standard countermeasure is red — a red waist sash, red underwear, in some places red cloth tied to your clothing. In Taiwan the associated temple practice, 安太歲 (ān tàisuì), involves registering at a temple, chanting by Daoist priests, and offerings made on the fifteenth of the lunar month.

09 2020, and the year everyone talked about 庚子 (gēngzǐ)

2020 was a 庚子 (gēngzǐ) year, the yang Metal Rat, sharing its designation with 1960, 1900, 1840, 1780 and 1720. That summer, Chinese social media filled up with the claim that 庚子 (gēngzǐ) years bring disaster.

Chinese historians and fact-checkers took the claim apart at the time. Go back two more 庚子 (gēngzǐ) years, to 1780 and 1720, and you land in a Qing dynasty golden age with no great disaster to show, which is why the list always starts at 1840.

A subtler point emerged alongside the debunking, and it is the more interesting one. In classical thought a stem-branch pair carried no inherent good or bad fortune at all, since auspiciousness was contextual, varying by occasion and by month.

10 Learning Chinese in the Year of the Rat

The Rat is a fine sign to have if you enjoy the language. It hands you a character broader than any English word for it, a hundred idioms that all lean the same way, a dialect word descended from a tax, and a pronunciation trap you will meet in your first month of study.

If you can explain why 老鼠 (lǎoshǔ) is pronounced láoshǔ but written lǎoshǔ, you are already ahead of most zodiac pages on the internet. The same goes for the rest of Chinese culture, where the interesting part usually sits one layer beneath the version that ranks.

Plenty of learners find that the fastest way to reach that layer is to learn Chinese in China, where the idioms, folk customs and dialect words are all still in daily use around you.

If you would like to work on that with a teacher, CLI runs one-on-one lessons both online and in person in Guilin, and offers a free trial lesson if you want to see how it feels first.

11 Year of the Rat vocabulary

Here are the key Chinese terms used above, in the order they appear. CLI's HSK 4 graded reader on Chinese zodiac animals covers the whole cycle if you would like the same vocabulary inside a story.

12 FAQ

13 Final thoughts

The Rat rewards a closer look more than almost any other sign in the cycle. Its position is a fact about the calendar, its missing rival is a question answered by ancient DNA, and its name is a small lesson in how Chinese words are built.

If you came here half-hoping to be told the Rat is secretly the best sign, the honest answer is better than that: it is the one with the most to explain.