The Ren-Zi Tai Sui: General Qiu De

Double water

Ren is the deep ocean, calm as a well one moment and a tide the next. Zi is midnight water, when the Rat sees everything in the dark. Two kinds of water together make one of the deepest pairings of the cycle, silent on the surface and powerful underneath.

General Qiu De guards this year. People born in Ren-Zi years often have deep, layered inner worlds, notice things others miss, and can look up at the stars even from the bottom of a well.

Deep as the night sea

His skin is a deep brown, almost black, like the ocean at night. He has a wide face, thin white whiskers and eyes like deep water, bright but impossible to see the bottom of.

He wears a green robe and a yellow cloak and holds a long sword high over his head: a warning to evil and a promise to everyone behind him.

Nine days of digging

According to legend, he was Qiu De, a Taoist hermit at the end of the Eastern Han dynasty, learned and gifted, who lived very simply and helped anyone who came to him.

One year it did not rain for months. The fields cracked and the harvest was about to fail. Qiu De studied the sky, the soil and the lay of the land for days, then went down the mountain with a few students and started digging in a patch of bare, dry ground. People thought he was crazy. "There's water down there," he said. "Nobody has found it yet."

After nine days they hit an underground stream. It became a deep, generous well that saved the farms for miles around.

Understanding its nature

Asked how he knew, he said, "Water doesn't disappear. It just hides. You don't find it with strength. You find it by understanding its nature."

Heaven named him the Tai Sui of the Ren-Zi year. A raised sword and a deep, understanding heart: that is his gift to everyone born in the Year of the Rat.