Cat Chinese Zodiac: Why Vietnam Has a Cat, Not a Rabbit

Cat Chinese Zodiac: The Quick Answer

The twelve zodiac animals are labels attached to an older twelve-symbol cycle called the Earthly Branches. 卯 (mǎo) is the fourth branch: Chinese tradition associates that branch with Rabbit, while Vietnamese tradition associates the corresponding branch, Mão/Mẹo, with Cat.

Two animals, not twelve: what actually differs

The twelve-branch framework itself — 子丑寅卯辰巳午未申酉戌亥 — is identical in both systems: each branch keeps the same position in the sequence, and the same sixty-year sexagenary cycle (the traditional system formed by combining ten Heavenly Stems with the twelve Earthly Branches) runs underneath both. What Vietnam changes is only the animal name at two of the twelve positions — a substitution the Victoria and Albert Museum’s overview of the lunar zodiac also documents:

So why isn’t the cat in the standard zodiac at all?

Vietnam’s cat aside, the standard Chinese zodiac has no cat. The short version: a well-known legend says the Rat tricked the Cat out of the Great Race, but the plainer historical reason is timing — the twelve animals were already fixed by about the 3rd century BC, centuries before house cats reached China along the Silk Road, so there was simply no cat to include. The full story, legend and history together, is laid out in why there’s no cat in the Chinese zodiac. What makes Vietnam the interesting exception is that there, the cat did get in — which is what the rest of this page is about.

The language explanation — and what gets lost when it’s retold

One of the most widely repeated explanations comes from Philippe Papin, a historian of Vietnam at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Writing about the question in 2011, Papin pointed to 卯 itself: “there is a little-used word for Rabbit in old Chinese (卯) that’s also pronounced mao,” and proposed that this near-homophone with the Vietnamese word for cat, mèo, is what carried the animal into Vietnamese as a cat rather than a rabbit. The exact historical route is debated among specialists, so this remains an explanation rather than a settled origin story.

Papin was careful about how far this claim goes — “I believe they did it in this precise case,” he wrote, not stating it as settled fact. That hedge tends to disappear once the idea is repeated. Retellings, including major outlets like the South China Morning Post, have compressed it into a flatter claim — that “the Chinese word for rabbit, ‘mao'” sounds like the Vietnamese word for cat. That’s not quite right: the modern Mandarin word for rabbit, 兔, is read tù. The mǎo reading belongs to 卯, the Earthly Branch character itself — a calendar and timekeeping symbol, not the everyday word for the animal. Papin’s own explanation already pointed at 卯, not 兔; it’s the popular retelling that blurs the two together.

Linguist John Phan of Columbia University, a specialist in Sino-Vietnamese historical phonology, has offered a more technical version of this argument: mẹo reflects an Early Sino-Vietnamese reading of 卯, while Mão reflects a later Sino-Vietnamese layer. On that analysis, the especially close historical comparison is mẹo with mèo, not simply modern Mandarin mǎo with mèo.

A folk explanation sometimes offered instead is that cats disliked water and missed a river crossing during the animals’ race to be chosen.

A cat-demon sorcery prosecution recorded in dynastic history

Centuries before the Vietnamese naming question, Chinese court records already linked cats to 子 — the same branch Rat occupies — in a very different context: criminal sorcery. The Book of Sui (隋书), the official dynastic history covering the Sui court (late sixth century), records a case against a nobleman named Dugu Tuo. A servant’s testimony describes a “cat demon” (猫鬼) cult practiced in the household:

The testimony explicitly links the ritual timing to 子 days and immediately explains 子 through its Rat association — it doesn’t go on to spell out why that link mattered to the ritual. A cat’s traditional role as a rat’s predator offers an obvious cultural context for why a cult built around a cat demon would fix on Rat’s day, but that reasoning isn’t the witness’s own stated explanation, only a plausible inference this page is drawing, not the source text.

The court treated the case as sorcery, and the consequences were severe: the empress and another official’s wife had fallen ill, physicians diagnosed “cat demon illness,” and the emperor initially ordered Dugu Tuo and his wife put to death. He was spared only after his brother appealed for mercy — stripped of official rank and reduced to commoner status, while his wife was made a Buddhist nun. This is a documented criminal case built around superstition, not a claim that cats ever held a seat in the zodiac. The connection it draws on is the same one this whole page is about: 子 was already associated with Rat, centuries before Vietnam’s separate naming question involving 卯 and Rabbit or Cat.

Why some households kept cats away from the dead

A separate, later strand of folk belief gave cats an unsettling reputation around death specifically — not sorcery this time, but the fear that a cat crossing a corpse could cause it to rise or change unnaturally. Taiwanese folk tradition, documented in early-twentieth-century ethnographic surveys, records one specific version of this fear built around an ordinary-looking cat called 油底貓 in one early ethnographic record (also recorded as 油踢貓, and commonly written 油蹄貓 today) — loosely, the “oil-paw cat.” If it crossed a corpse, its vital energy was believed to pass into the body, causing the corpse to rise as a harmful corpse-spirit rather than returning as a living person.

This oil-paw-cat story belongs to a broader Taiwanese belief that a cat crossing a corpse could cause the body to rise or change unnaturally. Funeral customs known as 守鋪 (“keeping watch”) and 驚貓 or 趕貓 (“keeping cats away”) are documented in connection with that broader fear, with a family member watching beside or near the body before encoffining. They also had an obvious practical function — protecting the body from animals — separate from the supernatural reasoning. It’s regional folklore rather than a nationwide rule, but a genuine, separately documented reason cats and death became linked in popular imagination — distinct from the Sui-dynasty sorcery case above, and centuries removed from it.

A Song-dynasty man who wouldn’t keep a cat

A few centuries later, the zodiac’s rat connection shows up again — this time as personal superstition rather than court sorcery. Yijian Zhi (夷坚志), Hong Mai’s twelfth-century collection of Song-dynasty accounts, includes a story titled Yu Shizi (玉狮子, “The Jade Lions”) about an official named Lü Yansheng:

The story continues: after repeated signs of rat activity, his household urged him to deal with the problem, arguing that if he’d kept a cat as usual the rat trouble would never have gotten this bad. When the area was finally dug up, workers uncovered a pair of small white-jade lion carvings. The story ends by saying Lü then understood the rats as repaying him by leading the household to the hidden treasure. Read past the folktale ending, the setup is the real point: a birth-year zodiac animal was treated as a real household reason to avoid an animal seen as its natural enemy. It’s a documented piece of Song-dynasty folk belief, not evidence that the practice was widespread.

Curious how your own chart carries this history forward?

Everything above is the shared cultural and linguistic background behind the Cat sign. Your own element and full stem-branch chart are a separate, more personal layer:

Where to go next