Vietnamese Zodiac

Vietnam's zodiac is the Chinese one, carried in during the thousand years when China ruled the Vietnamese lands. Ten of its twelve animals are exactly China's, in the same order, tied to the same lunisolar calendar and the same sixty-year stem-and-branch cycle. Tết, the Vietnamese New Year, falls on the same late-winter new moon as the Chinese one. On the essentials, this is an adopted system, and Vietnam has never claimed otherwise.

But Vietnam changed two of the twelve, and the changes are famous. Where China has the Rabbit, Vietnam has the Cat; where China has the Ox, Vietnam has the Water Buffalo. The buffalo is easy to understand — it is the animal of the rice paddy, far closer to Vietnamese life than a northern ox. The Cat is the real puzzle.

The most quoted explanation is linguistic: the fourth Earthly Branch, mão in Chinese, sounds almost exactly like mèo, the Vietnamese word for cat, and the Chinese "mão" that stood for the Rabbit was, on this account, simply heard as "cat." Others point to something plainer — cats mattered to Vietnamese farmers, guarding the grain from rats, while rabbits were less familiar. A folk version even has the cat swimming the great race to take fourth place. We cannot be certain which is true, and honesty means saying so; but the substitution is old and genuinely Vietnamese.

So the picture is the same as its neighbours', with a twist all its own: the framework is Chinese and adopted, not a native invention — but the Cat and the Buffalo are Vietnam's own contribution, and to a Vietnamese family the difference is anything but trivial. In the years the rest of East Asia keeps as the Rabbit, Vietnam alone celebrates the Year of the Cat.