Ji, the Winnowing Basket of the Azure Dragon

Ji, the Winnowing Basket, is the seventh of the twenty-eight xiu and the last mansion of the eastern palace, the Azure Dragon. Its name refers to a fan-shaped basket for winnowing grain, formed by stars in Sagittarius. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Leopard. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it marks a segment of the Moon's path, closing the seven mansions of the dragon before the sky passes to the northern palace. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu divide the heavens into four palaces; with the Winnowing Basket the Azure Dragon of spring gives way to the Black Tortoise of the north and winter.

Ji closing the eastern palace at the Winnowing Basket completes a sequence of seven mansions whose stars, drawn from parts of modern Virgo, Libra, Scorpius and Sagittarius, cross constellation boundaries the way the equivalent stretch of Vedic nakshatras and Arabic manazil also do, each tradition cutting the same band of sky along its own lines. The basket-shaped asterism was also, independently of its calendrical role, associated in Chinese folk astronomy with wind, since a winnowing basket was the tool used to separate grain from chaff in a moving current of air.