A Chinese Designation, Not a Corrupted Word

The name carried by this entry is not a garbled Arabic star-name but a Chinese catalogue designation: Kui Su wu, the fifth star of Kui, the fifteenth of the twenty-eight xiu or lunar mansions into which Chinese astronomy divided the sky. The Kui mansion, usually rendered Legs or Straddler, is one of the seven mansions of the White Tiger of the west, and its stars lie across the modern constellations of Andromeda and Pisces, which is why an Andromeda star should carry the name at all. Chinese mansion stars are numbered in sequence within the mansion rather than named individually, so designations of this form are positional labels, and identifying which modern star is meant requires care, since the determinative star of Kui itself was changed between earlier practice and the Qing dynasty. The tone marks that make the pinyin correct are what render badly in a plain ASCII display.

The mansions themselves are constructed on a different plan from the schemes an astrologer is likely to know. The Indian nakshatras and the Arabic manazil both divide the ecliptic, and both do it into equal or near equal parts. The Chinese xiu divide the celestial equator, and they are of very unequal width, some spanning more than thirty degrees and others only a couple. A xiu is bounded by the hour circle through its determinative star and runs from pole to pole, so it is a wedge of the whole sky rather than a segment of the zodiacal band. That is why a xiu can contain a star as far north as Andromeda, and why a xiu position cannot simply be converted into a nakshatra or a sign.