Fang (Room)

Fang (Room) is the fourth 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 Azure Dragon of the East, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the east, 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, Fang is assigned the Hare.

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.

Fang, the Room, is the fourth of the twenty-eight xiu and the fourth mansion of the eastern palace, the Azure Dragon. Its name means the room or chamber, sometimes read as the dragon's belly, identified with stars in Scorpius. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Rabbit. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it marks a portion of the sky along the Moon's monthly path. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu divide the heavens into four palaces of seven mansions each, the Azure Dragon holding the first seven and governing the east and spring. The mansion the Moon occupies on a given night informs the almanac's reckoning of the day's character.

Fang's identification with the belly or chamber of the dragon figure, read alongside Jiao's horns, Kang's neck and Di's root or chest earlier in the sequence, shows the eastern palace's seven mansions were named as consecutive parts of a single continuous body rather than as unrelated points, a naming logic paralleled independently in the Arabic manazil's own runs of body-part names across the Lion and Scorpion stations, though the two traditions never shared these specific figures or this specific vocabulary.