Pig

The Pig, also given as Boar, is paired with hai, the twelfth and last earthly branch, whose double-hour runs from nine to eleven at night and whose phase is water. It closes the cycle, and the tradition reads it for completion, abundance and rest. The pig has been the principal domesticated meat animal of China for several thousand years, and the character for a household or family, jia, is written as a pig under a roof, which is as direct a statement of the animal's standing as could be wished. It is accordingly a sign of prosperity, plenty and material comfort, and the traits given to it are generosity, sincerity, sociability, tolerance and a certain indulgence. In Japan and in some other regional versions this position is held by the wild boar rather than the domestic pig, which shifts the reading toward courage and headlong determination.

The character jia, household or family, showing a pig beneath a roof, is one of the most frequently cited examples in introductory accounts of Chinese writing for how a compound ideograph can encode a whole cultural assumption, in this case that a settled agrarian household is definitionally one that keeps a pig, within a single graphic form; the character's structure is attested from the oracle-bone script of the late Shang dynasty onward, making it one of the oldest continuously used compound characters in the writing system.

Sources A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and ThoughtWolfram Eberhard with Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age ChinaDavid N. Keightley

The pig belongs to the san he triad with the Rabbit and the Goat and stands opposite the Snake. Because it is the last sign, the pig year is often read in popular almanacs as a year for finishing what has been begun and for enjoying the results, before the cycle restarts with the Rat. This closing position is also where the two layers of the system are easiest to see: the branch hai is a term in an abstract twelve-part cycle used in China for counting days long before any animals were attached to it, while the pig is the emblem that later came to stand for it, attested in the Qin-period Shuihudi day-books of the third century BCE. Neither layer is decorative; the animals give the system its popular life, and the branches give it the arithmetic on which the calendar and its divinatory use actually run.

The Qin-period Shuihudi bamboo day-books, excavated in Hubei province in 1975 and dated to the late third century BCE, are among the earliest surviving physical documents to pair the twelve earthly branches with specific animal names for divinatory use, predating by centuries the more familiar Han-dynasty literary references to the full twelve-animal cycle, and their discovery substantially changed modern scholarly understanding of how early the animal associations, rather than the bare branch-counting system alone, were already in active use for everyday fortune-telling.