What in life contains the number 12?

Constellation, zodiac, earthly branch, 1 ft = 12 ft.

The Zodiac, also known as the Zodiac, is twelve kinds of animals in China that match the twelve earthly branches according to the year of birth, including rats, cows, tigers, rabbits, dragons, snakes, horses, sheep, monkeys, chickens, dogs and pigs.

The origin of the zodiac is related to animal worship. According to the Qin bamboo slips unearthed in Yunmeng Shuihudi, Hubei Province and Fangmatan, Tianshui, Gansu Province, there was a relatively complete zodiac system in the pre-Qin period. The earliest handed down document that recorded the same Chinese zodiac as the modern one was Lun Heng written by Wang Chong in the Eastern Han Dynasty.

Mouse association

The 25th day of the first lunar month is the "Cang Cang Festival", and grain merchants and rice vendors offer sacrifices to the "Cang Shen" rats. In the Qing Dynasty, Pan's "Ji Sheng at the Age of Emperor Jing" said: "This new festival is over, and it is appropriate to restore it." No lighting is allowed on the night of the filling festival, and the mouse marries a woman that night. However, the day when a mouse marries a woman is not uniform everywhere. On that day, people fried soybeans mixed with brown sugar and retreated to a corner. In Shaanxi, salt and rice grains are scattered in the corner, which is called "mouse sharing money". In southern Jiangsu, take off your shoes as a bride's sedan chair and peel as a gift box.

Marrying a mouse is also an important theme in New Year pictures and paper cutting. The sedan chair, lanterns and drum bands in the picture are like the grand occasion of human marriage. Sedan chairs play with mice, but the appearance of the bride and groom varies from place to place, and there is even a reproductive god in the shape of mice. Lu Xun recalled in Dog, Cat and Mouse, "The night of the fourteenth day of the first month was the night when I refused to fall asleep easily and waited for their ceremony to come out from under the bed."

Qinghai's "steaming blind mice", on the 14th day of the first month, kneaded twelve mice with flour, steamed them in a steamer without pinching their eyes, put them on the table for the Lantern Festival, and burned incense to beg the mice not to hurt crops.