Why Is Vietnam's Zodiac a Cat Instead of a Rabbit? The Answer Is in a 1651 Dictionary
Vietnamese people ask the question every Year of the Cat too; Qin bamboo slips and 10th-century Vietnamese texts use the rabbit, the cat first appears in a 1651 missionary dictionary, and one Vietnamese researcher went through the record on both sides.
[Why Is Vietnam's Zodiac a Cat Instead of a Rabbit? The Answer Is in a 1651 Dictionary]
Taiwan's Year of the Rabbit becomes the Year of the Cat once you cross into Vietnam. Vietnam and China share ten of the twelve zodiac animals; only two slots differ. The ox becomes a water buffalo, and the rabbit becomes a cat. The buffalo is easy to account for. Some linguists think the second earthly branch, chǒu, originally meant water buffalo and that northern China turned it into an ox. The cat has no such ready explanation.
The Vietnamese ask this question themselves. Every Year of the Cat, Vietnamese media run a round of "why are we the cat" pieces, and the last one, 2023, was no exception: in January an outlet used that very question as a headline, others followed for more than a month, and years earlier a Vietnamese scholar had written a journal paper on it. The most widely told answer is a story. The Jade Emperor held a river race to pick the twelve animals; the cat and the rat rode across on the buffalo's back, and halfway over the rat kicked the cat into the water. The Chinese version ends there, with the cat out of the running. The Vietnamese version adds a chapter: the cat made it to shore after all and took fourth place, right behind the tiger. The more serious answers come in two kinds. Cats catch rats, which matters to rice farmers. And the Sino-Vietnamese reading of the branch character 卯 is mão or mẹo, which sounds just like mèo, the Vietnamese word for cat.
Story or serious explanation, they all share a premise: when the zodiac reached Vietnam, the fourth slot held a rabbit, and the Vietnamese later swapped in the cat. Is there evidence for that? There is. In China, Qin dynasty bamboo slips excavated in 1975 state that mão is the rabbit. In Vietnam, a tenth-century prophecy recorded in a Buddhist text also uses the rabbit. The cat's first appearance in any reliable written record comes in 1651, in a dictionary compiled by a missionary. What happened in Vietnamese texts during the centuries in between, what the dictionary actually says, and why Cambodia still uses Vietnam's old version of the zodiac: pieced together, those records are the story of how the cat got its year.
