Ox 牛

The Ox came second because it was strong enough to swim the river and generous enough to carry a passenger, and did not notice it was being used until the last stride. Nothing about that story has ever been held against it. The Ox is the sign of people who do the work: patient, dependable, slow to anger and slower to give up.

It is also, of the twelve, the animal most bound up with the script in the corner of the painting. The Shang diviners wrote on ox scapulae — the flat shoulder blade of this animal was the paper of the earliest Chinese writing. The oracle-bone character for ox was carved into ox bone.

So this one is painted as a bronze rather than as a beast: a 尊 vessel of the same period as the writing, spiral-cast, ceremonial, standing still. It is the ox as the Shang would have thought of it — an animal that belonged to the ritual as much as to the field.