Year of the Dog in the Chinese Zodiac

The Dog’s place in the cycle

A page on chinaculture.org says the Dog “follows Rooster as eleventh in the twelve Animal Years of the Chinese zodiac.” The Cleveland Museum of Art describes the twelve-animal zodiac series, dog included, as signifying “a traditional Chinese concept of time structured in a cyclical order.”

Two legends about the Dog’s place

Wellcome Collection tells a Great Race story. In that story, the Jade Emperor summoned all the animals, and the first twelve to cross the river and reach him were put in the zodiac. In the story the dog was a strong swimmer, but it “couldn’t resist stopping to play in the river” and “almost missed out” by finishing eleventh.

The Lam Museum of Anthropology gives a different legend, in which the Jade Emperor needed to choose twelve animals as palace guards. In that telling, Dog “bit Rabbit in a fit of anger” and “was sent to the back of the line as punishment.” The page adds: “Of course, this is only a story.”

Traits people attach to the Dog

Wellcome Collection says the dog “has the reputation of being loyal and enthusiastic,” and that people born in the Year of the Dog “are said to share the dog’s playful enthusiasm and loyalty” but “can also be stubborn.” A page on chinaculture.org says people born in that year are “very strong-willed” and “extremely loyal in friendship and love.” A National Museums Liverpool page, where Billy Hui explains the animals, calls the Dog “very generous but can be stubborn and selfish at the same time.”

A V&A blog post by Ming Wilson takes the Rabbit as its example. Saying that someone born in the Year of the Rabbit “would be of such and such a character” is, Wilson writes, “a fairly recent development,” and “There is no mention of such a belief in old Chinese texts.”

The Dog and the moon

Wellcome Collection says that in Chinese mythology a dog is responsible for the solar eclipse. “Legend has it that Tiangou (the Heavenly Dog) ate the moon, but he was captured and forced to spit the moon back out.”

A page on chinaculture.org says that in ancient times an eclipse of the moon was thought to occur when Celestial Dog, “a demon who lived on the moon,” swallowed the moon. People would bang gongs and beat drums “to intimidate Celestial Dog into spitting out the moon.”

Dogs in museum collections

Wilson’s V&A post lists an earthenware dog from the Eastern Han dynasty among its examples, and says that in the Han dynasty “dogs were bred for food, like pigs and lambs.”

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s record for its set of zodiac figures gives the medium as gray earthenware with traces of slip and the origin as China, Northern Wei dynasty. The museum says that using the twelve zodiac animals as tomb furniture “suggests they provided a cosmological structure for the afterlife.”