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Er Ya Yi said, "Cats are the fiercest of small animals. Yin and fear of cold, although lying in the middle of the summer is not afraid; The nose is cold and wet at all times, but it is warm at the summer solstice. If the eyes are fixed in the morning and evening, the day will be like a line, and if it is cloudy, it will be demobilized. After catching rats, its ears are missing like saws, such as tigers eating people and sawing ears. If you wash your face, you will win. " Cats are pets of countless families in today’s cities, and there are countless photos of cats in MengMeng when you open the webpage, which is very cute! In that case, why is it not in the zodiac?

Liang Kai in Southern Song Dynasty’s "The Picture of a Bee and Butterfly Playing Cat" (partial)

There is a saying that there were no cats in our country when the zodiac was scheduled. It was only in the Han Dynasty that this animal was introduced from Egypt, so it is impossible to have cats in the zodiac. So was there a cat in China before the Han Dynasty? Is the cat native to China or imported from abroad?

The selection and arrangement of the zodiac is to compare each animal with people and select 12 animals with specific defects as zodiac signs. Rats have teeth and no teeth, cows have no teeth, tigers have no spleen, rabbits have no lips, dragons have no ears, snakes have no feet, horses have no guts, sheep have no pupils, monkeys have no hips, chickens have no kidneys, dogs have no stomachs, and pigs have no tendons. Naturally, such defects are symbolic, but people do not have these defects. When the sages chose twelve kinds of animals as zodiac signs, they didn’t take the biological characteristics of these animals as the necessary basis. For example, the dragon in the zodiac is not found in the real animal world. The reason why it was also selected into the zodiac is that our sages deified the dragon.

Except snakes, the chronological order of the zodiac is based on the odd-even number of each animal’s paw. Odd digits of paws are arranged in odd digits, and even digits are arranged in even digits.

Rats have four paws on the front foot and five paws on the back foot, which straddle the boundary of Yin and Yang when they are young. When the night is from 23: 00 to 24: 00, they are represented by four paws on the front foot, and when the sun is born, they are represented by five paws on the back foot, which means that the function of bearing Yin and enlightening Yang belongs to rats, so they are expelled when they are young. Cows are artiodactyls, and ugly steaks are second; Tiger has five claws, odd number, and the third is Yinshi tiger; Rabbits have four claws, even number, and the fourth is Maoshi rabbit; The dragon has five claws, odd number, and the fifth is Chenshilong; Snakes have no feet, but the tongue of snakes is bifurcated into two or even numbers, and the sixth is the fourth snake; Horses have round hooves, round hooves, yin and yang meet and blend, and the anode is cloudy. From 11: 00 to 13: 00 at noon, the yin and yang are evenly integrated, so the seventh place is noon horses; Sheep are cloven-hoofed animals, ranking eighth as untimely sheep; Monkeys are also five-clawed, odd-numbered, ranking ninth as Shenshi monkeys; Chickens are four-clawed, even-numbered, and the tenth is unitary chickens; Dogs have five claws, odd number, and the eleventh is the dog; You Zhu is an artiodactyl animal, ranking 12th as the Herpetus pig. In the year of the Zodiac, heavenly stems and earthly branches is a 60-year cycle, and the earthly branch is the year of the Zodiac.

The above 12 zodiac animals have clearly put tigers in. Perhaps it was not that there were no cats in our country at that time. Cats and tigers belong to the same family, and the tiger patterns are gorgeous and magnificent, which is incomparable to cats. In people’s aesthetics, they must choose tigers instead of cats.

Hu Zaobin’s Gu Ying Proud in the Republic of China

Let’s talk about whether there were cats in ancient China.

The Book of Songs Daya Han Yi says, "Kong Le Han Tu, Chuan Ze, Fu Fu, Fu Lu, Xiong, Hu, cat and tiger." Chapter 40 of Yi Zhoushu’s Interpretation of the World’s Prisoners contains: "The King of Wu was inaugural, and there were two birds and tigers, two cats, five thousand two hundred and thirty-five, two rhinoceroses, one yak, one bear, eight jackals, three hundred and fifty jackals, eight raccoons and six owls."

The Book of Songs, Han Yi, itself is the work of Yin Jifu’s beautiful Xuan Wang, which is about the end of the Western Zhou Dynasty. The titles in Yizhoushu are definitely not written by one person and have different ages. However, Mr. Guo Moruo thinks that only three or two articles in Yizhoushu can be trusted as early Zhou characters in his book A Study of China Ancient Society, and The Interpretation of World Prisoners is one of them, which is the most credible. In the preface to Yi Zhou Shu, Li Xueqin also believed that The Interpretation of World Prisoners was a work in the early Western Zhou Dynasty.

In the poem "Han Yi", domestic cats are so small that they can’t be qualified to be sung in parallel with large mammals such as deer, bears, tigers and leopards. King Wu can’t show off his valor by killing a kitten when hunting. The cats in these two articles are definitely not domesticated domestic cats, but should be bobcats the size of tigers. But at least this article tells us that the word "cat" has been widely used in the pre-Qin period before Han Dynasty and even in the early years of Zhou Dynasty. The animal character "cat" must have been created after the cat first. Shuo Wen Xu said: "Cang Xie, the history of the Yellow Emperor, saw the traces of birds and animals’ hooves, and knew the differences and differences, and he first made a book contract." Xu Shen’s textual research tells us that Cangjie’s characters are made according to birds and animals. The word "cat" came first, and then the word "cat" came out. In the Song Dynasty, Lu Dian explained the mouse cloud: "Rats harm seedlings, and cats can catch them, so cats follow seedlings." This poem also tells us that the seedlings of Chinese farmers have been harmed by rats since ancient times.

"The Book of Songs Xiaoya Datian": "Fuck the moth and its pest, it’s harmless to my field. Tian Zu has a god, and he is burning with fire. " In the Song Dynasty, Luo Yuan wrote in Er Ya Yi: "People are also those who are angry when they go to repel insects and thieves. Those who go to the field of voles are cats and tigers. " And Luo would like to think that cats and tigers are the gods of Tian Zu. Rats kill seedlings and jackals destroy crops. Cats catch mice to raise seedlings, while tigers eat pigs to protect crops (crops that are ripe for storage are called crops). During the week, farmers regarded cats and tigers as grain gods and greeted them with sacrifices. "Book of Rites, Special Sacrifice in the Suburb" contains: "Welcome the cat and eat voles for it; Welcome the tiger and feed it. Welcome and sacrifice. " The Duke of Zhou made rites and made merry, so the cat here is definitely not a bobcat hunting, but a cat that is the natural enemy of rats. This is also the cat of the Zhou Dynasty, but also the cat of China.

(Source: The first issue of Literature and History Knowledge magazine of Zhonghua Book Company in 2023)