The most historically revealing feature of the Heavenly Market Enclosure is its walls. The eleven stars of the left wall and the eleven of the right are not named for gods, ministers or instruments but for states: the countries of the Zhou world, from great powers like Chu, Qi and Yan to smaller principalities, each assigned one star in the fence around the celestial market. The device turns the enclosure into a map of political geography, and a datable one, because the roster of states reflects the world before the Qin unification of 221 BCE, preserved in a sky scheme that reached its settled form under the Han.
Astronomers of the imperial era were consciously curating an inheritance: the catalogues credited to Shi Shen and Gan De predate unification, and the enclosure's walls carry that older world forward the way a modern atlas might preserve historical borders in a commemorative map. The naming also had practical use in the omen tradition. Because each wall star answered to a named region, an event beside it, a comet, an occultation, a guest star, could be assigned a terrestrial address, and the histories record readings of exactly that form, tying a disturbance in the market's wall to a specific state's fortunes. A visitor tracing the enclosure today is looking at a functioning piece of Han political cosmology, fossilised in star names.