Third of the Twelve, the Sign of Courage

The tiger is the third animal of the Chinese zodiac. As a birth-sign it is read for courage, authority, competitiveness and a certain restless independence, the qualities of a predator that hunts alone. Beyond the calendar the tiger is one of the great apotropaic figures of East Asian folk practice: its image guards doorways and children's clothing against evil, and paintings of tigers were hung to drive off malign influence, a protective role that draws directly on the real animal's standing as the apex predator of the region. The sign is associated with the pre-dawn hours and, in the five-element scheme, most strongly with wood.

White tigers, familiar from zoos and circuses, are not a distinct subspecies or albinos but ordinary Bengal tigers carrying a rare recessive gene for reduced pigmentation; essentially every white tiger alive today descends from a single wild-caught cub named Mohan, captured in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh in 1951 and then deliberately inbred to fix the trait, a breeding history that modern zoo and conservation organisations now generally discourage because of the health problems it has concentrated in the line. The subspecies most bound up with Chinese tradition has fared worst: the South China tiger has had no confirmed sighting in the wild since the 1990s and is considered functionally extinct there, so the tiger the zodiac and its apotropaic imagery draw on survives today mainly through the Siberian and Bengal populations of other regions.