Tenth of the Twelve, the Punctual Sign

The rooster is the tenth sign of the Chinese zodiac. As a birth-sign it is read for confidence, honesty, hard work and a certain flamboyant, punctual reliability, the bird that announces the hour and struts while doing it. It is associated with the early-evening hours and, in the elemental scheme, with metal. In Chinese folk symbolism the cock carries protective and auspicious meaning: its crowing banishes ghosts, and the word for cock puns on words for luck and for high office, so that images of a crowing cock were given as wishes for success. The calendrical sign inherits this generally favourable and forthright character.

A 2013 study by the Japanese chronobiologist Takashi Yoshimura confirmed experimentally what farmers had long assumed but could not prove, that a rooster's dawn crow is driven by an internal circadian clock rather than triggered simply by the first light it sees; roosters kept in constant dim light still crowed on a roughly daily rhythm, though real dawn light could still override the internal clock and prompt an earlier call, a modern scientific footnote to the bird's ancient reputation as the herald of the day. The domestic chicken behind this sign descends from the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia, most likely the region spanning southern China, Myanmar and Thailand, though geneticists still debate the exact date of domestication, with estimates ranging from roughly three and a half to eight thousand years ago.