Goat 羊

羊 is one of the load-bearing characters of the language. Put it over 大 and you get 美, beautiful. Put it over 我 and you get 義, righteousness. Put it beside 食 and you get 養, to nourish. A civilisation that built its words for beauty and virtue out of the sign for sheep was not being sentimental — it was being agricultural.

The sign itself is the gentlest of the twelve: kind, creative, easily hurt, happiest making something. It is also the one Chinese parents are most often warned about, on the strength of a superstition about Goat-year children that historians can trace no further back than the late Qing and that nobody has ever been able to substantiate.

Painted, again, as a bronze — the four-ram 尊 in the National Museum in Beijing is the most famous surviving Shang bronze of all, and this ram stands in that shadow. The red sash is the one thing in the picture that moves.