Ninth of the Twelve, the Clever Sign

The monkey is the ninth sign of the Chinese zodiac. As a birth-sign it is read for cleverness, versatility, curiosity and a mischievous, sometimes unreliable ingenuity, the trickster temperament that Sun Wukong embodies at literary length. It is associated with the late-afternoon hours and, in the elemental scheme, with metal. Of the twelve it is the sign most explicitly tied to intelligence and quick problem-solving, and popular character-reading treats the monkey-born as sociable, inventive and easily bored. The calendrical monkey and the divine and literary monkeys reinforce one another: a creature admired for cleverness and distrusted for using it.

The monkey enters Chinese decorative art through a specific pun: a monkey riding on a horse's back, ma shang feng hou, reads literally as monkey on horse but sounds identical to a phrase meaning to be ennobled immediately, so paintings and carvings of a monkey mounted on a horse were popular gifts wishing swift promotion, an entirely independent tradition from the zodiac sign though drawing on the same animal. The monkey most often pictured in this zodiac imagery is the rhesus macaque, Macaca mulatta, native to China and one of the most widely distributed primates on Earth after humans, a real and adaptable animal quite distinct from Sun Wukong, the entirely fictional Monkey King of Journey to the West.