Origin 433 BCE
The eighth mansion, the Southern Dipper, lies in Sagittarius and opens the northern palace of the Black Tortoise. Distinct from the Big Dipper of Ursa Major, it is associated with measurement, official rank and good fortune. This is one of the widest lodges in the set. Widths vary greatly because each lodge runs from its own reference star to the next and the stars are not evenly spaced; the largest span more than thirty du and the smallest barely one. The system records where bright stars actually stand rather than imposing equal divisions on the sky.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)26 du (about 25.6 degrees of equatorial arc) 2Tradition: Han-era Shi Shen tradition (Kaiyuan Zhanjing) Du: the arc-degree unit of the classical Chinese calendar, where a full circle equalled 365 and a quarter du (about 0.9856 modern degrees per du). This width is the Han-era figure standardized under the Taichu calendar and preserved in the Tang-dynasty Kaiyuan Zhanjing's Shi Shen star table; later dynasties recorded small revisions as precession shifted the determinative stars, so this is one epoch's figure, not a timeless constant. It measures the mansion's extent along the celestial equator (right ascension), the coordinate system Chinese astronomy actually used, not a position on the ecliptic (tropical zodiac); the atlas has no sourced mapping from this equatorial system onto a start point in ecliptic longitude, so this figure alone cannot be substituted into a start-end boundary range the way the equal Arabic-mansion spans are. Determinative StarPhi Sagittarii 2Tradition: Han-era Shi Shen tradition (Kaiyuan Zhanjing) Origins
Origin Period433 BCE 1Tradition: Chinese equatorial astronomy Origin PeriodThe full set of twenty-eight lunar mansions is attested together for the first time on the lacquer box from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, sealed in 433 BCE, the earliest surviving object to record the complete list of names. 1 Origin of the NameThe English "lunar mansion" is borrowed from the Indian nakshatras and the Arabic manazil and misdescribes the xiu. A xiu is a lodge marked by a determinative star and measured in right ascension along the celestial EQUATOR; it is not a division of the Moon's ecliptic path, and the three systems are not variants of one scheme. 2 Attributions
PalaceBlack Tortoise of the North 1 Learn More
The Lunar Mansion Dou (Dipper)
Dou (Dipper) is the eighth of the twenty-eight xiu, the lunar mansions of traditional Chinese astronomy. Each xiu is a segment of the sky marked by a group of stars near the celestial equator, and together they divide the heavens into the belt through which the sun, moon and planets appear to move.
Palace, animal and place in the sky
This mansion belongs to the Black Tortoise of the North, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the north, one of the four symbolic creatures among which the twenty-eight are shared out seven to each. In the later scheme that pairs every mansion with a creature, Dou is assigned the Xie (a horned beast).
The twenty-eight mansions are among the oldest elements of Chinese sky-lore, attested well before the common era and used to track the nightly progress of the moon and to fix the calendar. The system is described here as that documented astronomical and calendrical tradition, from which its astrological uses later grew.
Dou, the Dipper of the Black Tortoise
Dou, the Dipper, is the eighth of the twenty-eight xiu and the first mansion of the northern palace, the Black Tortoise, which holds the second group of seven and governs the direction north and the season of winter. This is the Southern Dipper, formed by stars in Sagittarius, distinct from the more famous Northern Dipper of the Great Bear. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Unicorn. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it tracks a segment of the Moon's monthly path. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu order the sky into four palaces of seven mansions, the Black Tortoise, a tortoise entwined with a snake, spanning the northern quarter of the heavens.
Distinguishing this Southern Dipper from the far more famous Northern Dipper of the Great Bear, which anchors circumpolar navigation and Daoist ritual astronomy in a wholly separate part of the sky, is one of the more common points of confusion for readers new to the twenty-eight mansions; the Southern Dipper's seven stars in Sagittarius mark only the opening of the northern palace's own winter sequence and carry none of the pole-centred symbolism the Northern Dipper accumulated in later Chinese religious astronomy.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Commonly Conflated with (See Note)
Dou among the twenty eight lunar mansions is the Southern Dipper in Sagittarius, not the northern Beidou.
Contained In
One of the seven lunar lodges of this palace.
Originates in Language
Sources
1. Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven
David W. Pankenier, Cambridge University Press, 2013On the twenty-eight lodges and the Zeng Hou Yi lacquer chest
2. Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth
Joseph Needham, Cambridge University Press, 1959Vol. 3, the section on astronomy: the hsiu (lunar mansions), the equatorial system and the du measureQuote, Vol. 3, the section on astronomy: the hsiu (lunar mansions), the equatorial system and the du measure
The twenty-eight lodges are equatorial divisions bounded by determinative stars and so of unequal width, measured in du on a circle of 365.25 parts; their relation to the Indian and Arabic lunar mansion systems is unresolved.
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