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

Look up your Chinese zodiac animal, find out that you are a Rat, and you may feel a little let down. There are twelve animals in the cycle, and you seem to have drawn the one that gets into the grain store.

Before you resign yourself to that, it helps to know how much of the Rat's image problem comes from English. The character at the center of it, 鼠 (shǔ), doesn't split rats from mice the way English does, and it never picked up the sense that makes calling someone "a rat" sting.

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

Below we go through the dates and the language first, then the folk customs and the astrology, and we say as we go which parts are documented history and which arrived much later. Once you keep those apart, the Rat turns out to be one of the more interesting signs in the Chinese zodiac.

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. Keep an eye on the 立春 (lìchūn, "start of spring") column, because it matters more than you might expect (the next section explains why).

Both gaps (twelve years between Rat years, sixty between Water Rat years) come from the same mechanism. Years in the Chinese calendar are labeled by pairing ten heavenly stems with twelve earthly branches, a system called 干支 (gānzhī).

The two wheels turn together, one notch a year, so a given pair doesn't come round again for sixty years. Because the animal goes with the branch, it returns every twelve years, while the element goes with the stem, which is why the Water Rat only comes back every sixty.

I was born in January or February: am I really a Rat?

This is where zodiac tables most often go wrong, and it catches anyone born between about January 20 and February 20.

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 disagree about which is right. The clearest example we found is in a mathematician's study of the Chinese calendar, 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?

No, and the language itself shows it.

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 a festive figure, and Korea's national folk museum links the same first sign with fecundity and wealth, and with the north.

It is true that the Rat has less glamour than the Dragon, and you can measure the gap, since Chinese Dragon years show birth spikes of hundreds of thousands. That is a fact about the Dragon, though, not about the Rat.

02 Why is the Rat first in the Chinese zodiac?

It comes down to 子 (zǐ). Stem-and-branch notation was used to count days in the earliest Chinese writing we have, and a complete cycle of sixty signs appears in Shang oracle-bone inscriptions by around 1200 BCE.

The animals were added later to match branch names that already existed. The Rat is first because it goes with 子 (zǐ), the first branch, and nobody ordered that list with animals in mind.

Every explanation of why it is a rat in particular (the midnight hour, the toe counts, the great race) is a later attempt to make sense of a pairing that was already fixed.

The archaeology agrees. 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, but a deer sits in the Horse's slot and the horse one place later, in the Goat's, 酉 (yǒu) has a pheasant instead of a rooster, the Dog's slot holds an old sheep, and 辰 (chén) is blank (probably because the scribe left out the dragon). At least five slots differ from the modern list while the Rat was already fixed, which is just what you would expect if the animals were fitted onto an older list.

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.

Take the midnight rat. 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. 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 good story, told all over East Asia, and there's no reason not to enjoy it. But it comes from folklore, and none of the sources we consulted could date it or name its earliest recorded version.

The three pre-modern texts we found that try to explain the order come from the Song dynasty (one) and the Ming (two). They reason from five-element theory and from yin and yang (one even counts the animals' toes), and none of them mentions a race across a river or the Jade Emperor.

Why is there no cat in the Chinese zodiac?

Here the evidence is unusually good, and it comes from archaeology: 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. Before that, leopard cats, a different species entirely, had lived alongside Chinese farmers for about 3,500 years, until around 150 CE, and the study finds a gap of several centuries before the earliest known domestic cat, dated to about 730 CE.

Put that next to the Shuihudi slips. The list of animals had been written down by 217 BCE, roughly a thousand years before the earliest known domestic cat in China.

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 no source we found documents it, so treat it as a good guess.

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

If you are learning Chinese, this is the most useful part, because the Rat's vocabulary is more irregular than it looks.

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 doesn't mean "old." It is a prefix that turns 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 call "the northern word." That isn't quite right: data from across China's dialect map puts it in the northeast and, separately, in the southwest.

The word's origin is our favorite fact about the Rat. 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 roughly a hundred four-character idioms (成语, chéngyǔ) built on 鼠 (shǔ), and nearly all of the ones people actually use are unflattering (the exception is the Zhuangzi one at the end of the table, about needing very little, and the Shijing "big rat" in the table is a two-character classical term). We checked every entry against 漢典 (Hàndiǎn) or the idiom dictionary of the Ministry of Education in Taiwan.

Two are routinely mistranslated. 首鼠两端 (shǒu shǔ liǎng duān) means hesitating between two options, not being "two-faced." And 投鼠忌器 (tóu shǔ jì qì) is about restraint: you want to throw something at the rat, but the rat is sitting next to your good crockery.

The oldest layer is 硕鼠 (shuò shǔ), "the big rat," and it is political. In the Shijing poem of that name, the big rat is told 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?

It is both. English splits rats from mice and Chinese doesn't, because 鼠 (shǔ) names a body shape and a set of habits, and it stretches a long way.

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 goes back to the character's oldest recorded definition: the Han dynasty Shuowen Jiezi, the founding text 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

Chinese folk tradition has a whole observance about rats, and English-language zodiac pages rarely mention it.

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

There isn't one date for it. 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.

All of those dates fall in the busy first lunar month, which also has the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth, while New Year celebrations are still going on.

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 and rice, cakes and sweets.

The reasoning is simple enough. If you disturb them for one night, they will disturb you for a year.

The prints are the best part. They draw the procession as a full human wedding, with the bride in red in a flower sedan chair, the groom on horseback and musicians and gift-carriers behind, while a cat lies in wait along the route. One version even shows the cat accepting a bribe.

The folk-art historian Wang Shucun had a practical explanation for the custom. 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 worked together to get the children to bed early and the rats out into the open, where the cats could deal with them.

The Rat as a symbol of children

Abundance and full granaries are a hard sell for an animal whose classic image, 硕鼠 (shuò shǔ), is eating the peasant's millet. The well-documented positive meaning of the rat is children, and the logic is a pun.

子 (zǐ), the Rat's branch, 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 clearest imperial example is Bitter Gourd and Rats, painted by the Ming emperor Xuanzong in 1427, which scholars read as a prayer for the safe birth of an heir.

This often gets stated the wrong way round. The classic grapes motif pairs a squirrel with grapes, not 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 popular Chinese sources today in very similar words, so it is a real cultural object: a widely shared stereotype.

Classical doctrine is a different story. 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 you would expect a personality-by-birth-animal doctrine if the tradition had one.

It has no such doctrine. The chapter argues instead about why each animal is paired with each branch, and it reads character from configurations across the whole chart, not 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 pairings is a newspaper-horoscope format, while the classical texts work from the whole chart.

Enjoy the trait list by all means. Just read it as popular culture, and keep it apart from what the classical tradition says.

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.

Don't read it as a prediction about your real relationships, though. It describes traditional astrological relations between the branches.

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. So of all the popular zodiac material, compatibility is the part with a real classical pedigree.

Learn the language behind the zodiac

Almost everything on this page comes down to Chinese characters and words. At CLI your lessons are one-on-one, and you can take them online or in person in Guilin.

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07 Lucky numbers, colors and directions

The Rat's link to north and to black or dark blue is a real tradition, and its logic 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 and colors on popular astrology sites have no such logic behind them. They flatly contradict each other, and one site's lucky direction turns up on another's list of directions to avoid.

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 says this is an unlucky year for you, 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 usual countermeasure is to wear red: a red waist sash or red underwear, and in some places a strip of red cloth tied to your clothing. In Taiwan there is also a temple rite, 安太歲 (ān tàisuì), where you register at a temple and Daoist priests chant, with 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.

The same debunking made a subtler point. In classical thought a stem-branch pair carried no good or bad fortune of its own, and whether it was auspicious depended on the occasion and the 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 nearly 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. You can do the same with the rest of Chinese culture once you can read the sources in Chinese.

We think the fastest way to get there is to learn Chinese in China, where you hear the idioms and dialect words every day and see the folk customs for yourself.

If you want to spend Chinese New Year in Guilin, plan around the holiday itself. Mira, our Admissions Manager, tells students that many of our teachers take time off over Chinese New Year and that our activities and meals stop for the break, so she suggests starting before or after it. Classes can continue through the holiday, though you may have a substitute teacher, and students who would rather travel for those days can make up the classes at the end of their program. It is a quiet stretch at the school, and one student wrote in their program evaluation that they wished there had been more activities for students during Chinese New Year. If you want the New Year customs as well as the lessons, our advice is to start a few weeks before the break, so you already have some Chinese to use when the holiday arrives.

If you would like to work on your Chinese 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

These are the 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

If you take one practical thing from this page, make it the dates. Anyone born between about January 20 and February 20 should check their birthday against both conventions before trusting a zodiac table.

And if you are a Rat and still a little disappointed, the Chinese word for your sign also covers squirrels and hamsters, which is better company than English gives you.

Want to learn Chinese in China? CLI students study one-on-one with their own teachers in Guilin. See the Immersion Program, or start with a free 30-minute online lesson.