2006-01-29

Cuca: The Year of Dog

Falling on the 29th of this year, Spring Festival, or the Chinese Lunar New Year is the most important festival in China. Moreover, according to the Chinese almanac, today we usher in the year of the dog. Of course, there’s a universal saying that a dog is man’s best friend, yet they hold a particular special meaning for the Chinese, symbolizing wealth and good luck – in fact generally helping people to avoid leading a dog’s life. Let’s join our reporter … for a look at this Year of the Dog, and Chinese folklore’s high regard for the canine.

Reporter: The dog is the eleventh in the 12-lunar-year cycle of animal signs. Altogether the Chinese almanac includes twelve annual animal signs, in the order of rat, buffalo, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Thus, last year was that of the Rooster, while after this Year of the Dog we will move on to the Pig.

One may well wonder why the dog comes 11th in this cycle, or indeed, if there is any logic at all to this system. Hailing from the Beijing Folk Artists Association, folk culture expert Wang Zuoji gives an interesting but rather complicated explanation.

“The positions of these animals in the cycle are decided by their number of claws and their natural habits. So, animals with an odd number of claws on each paw are assigned to odd sequences in the cycle. For example, the rat comes first because they’re very special - they’ve got four claws on their forepaws and five on their rear paws, while they’re at their most active at night from 11 to 1 o’clock, giving them first place in the cycle. After that, the ox follows. The dog comes in at 11th because they’ve got five claws on each paw.”