In fact, the word "Year of the Monkey, Ma Yue" did not exist in the previous Chinese Standard Dictionary, which was synonymous with "Year of the Donkey, Ma Yue". Because there are no donkeys in the zodiac, the ancients used an animal that does not exist in the zodiac to point out the feeling of nowhere. It has been verified that "Year of the Monkey and the Moon" is a word that only appeared after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and "Year of the Donkey" has already appeared in many ancient books.
Songshi Daoyuan's "Jingde Deng Chuan Lu" Volume 9: "His teacher reads classics under the window another day, and bees throw paper at the window to find out. The teacher said,' The world is so big that he refuses to go out. If you study his old newspaper carefully, you will get it in the Year of the Donkey! Then a monk said,' It's crazy to refuse to leave the empty door and throw it at the window. When will the old paper come out after a hundred years of drilling? "When the Zen master saw the bee drilling the window paper, he thought it had no future. Later, he used this story to express that he couldn't understand ancient books and didn't know how to be flexible. The year of the donkey here is consistent with the year of the monkey.
Later, people expanded the word "year of the donkey" into four words, and used Malay intertextuality with the same attributes and similar appearance as the donkey to produce an idiom "year of the donkey and horse month", which has the same effect as "year of the donkey". For example, Volume 20 of "Collection of Cloth Water Stations" has the saying that "there are three buddhas in the year of donkey, and there are not many horses in the month".
How did the "Year of the Donkey" evolve into the "Year of the Monkey" that people often say now? Some people think that people in some areas pronounce "when is the month" in dialect, which sounds like "Year of the Monkey, the month of the horse", so it has spread like this. However, the real reason why the year of the donkey became the year of the monkey has not been verified for the time being.