Wei, the Stomach of the White Tiger

Wei, the Stomach, is the seventeenth of the twenty-eight xiu and the third mansion of the western palace, the White Tiger, the third mansion romanised Wei, this one meaning stomach. It is identified with stars in Aries. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Pheasant. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it tracks a segment of the Moon's monthly circuit. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu order the heavens into four palaces of seven mansions each; the several mansions sharing the romanisation Wei are distinguished in Chinese by different characters and meanings, tail, rooftop, and here stomach, though they fall in different palaces of the sky.

Wei the Stomach, third of the three mansions sharing that romanised spelling, sits in Aries alongside Lou, and Chinese court astrology of the imperial period read this pair together as governing granaries and stored grain, the stomach image extended from the individual body of the White Tiger to the collective provisioning of the state, a specifically administrative layer of meaning the equivalent stretch of the Vedic and Arabic lunar-mansion systems does not carry in anything like the same form.