Lou, the Bond of the White Tiger

Lou, the Bond, is the sixteenth of the twenty-eight xiu and the second mansion of the western palace, the White Tiger. Its name is read as a bond, tie, or gathering, identified with stars in Aries. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Dog. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it marks a portion of the Moon's path. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu divide the sky into four palaces of seven mansions, the White Tiger of the west gathering the mansions the almanac assigns to autumn. The mansion the Moon occupies on a given night informs the almanac's judgement of the day's favourable and unfavourable activities.

Lou's stars in Aries mark the western palace's second mansion, and the field-allocation astrology, fenye, that correlated each of the twenty-eight xiu with a region of the Chinese world assigned this mansion to a specific eastern province in most surviving schemes, though the exact province-to-mansion correspondences differ somewhat between the versions preserved in different dynastic histories, a genuine inconsistency in the sources rather than a single settled traditional table.