Chinese Xiu (Mansions)
Kui (Legs)
Also Known As Kui
White Tiger of the West
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Origin 433 BCE
The fifteenth mansion opens the western palace of the White Tiger with stars in Andromeda and Pisces. Associated with the harvest storehouse, feet and travel, it governs journeys and the gathering of grain. Precession has carried the lodges away from the positions they held when their reference stars were chosen, and Chinese astronomers reselected determinative stars over the centuries to keep the system usable. The names stayed fixed while the stars defining them did not, which complicates any attempt to date the scheme from its contents.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)16 du (about 15.8 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 StarEta Andromedae 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
PalaceWhite Tiger of the West 1 Learn More
The Lunar Mansion Kui (Legs)
Kui (Legs) is the fifteenth 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 White Tiger of the West, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the west, 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, Kui is assigned the Wolf.
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.
Kui, the Legs of the White Tiger
Kui, the Legs, is the fifteenth of the twenty-eight xiu and the first mansion of the western palace, the White Tiger, which holds the third group of seven and governs the direction west and the season of autumn. Its name is read as legs or strides, identified with stars in Andromeda and Pisces. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Wolf. 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 each, the White Tiger, a fierce white beast, spanning the western quarter of the heavens the almanac ties to autumn.
Kui opening the western palace shares its stretch of sky, in Andromeda and Pisces, with two of the Arabic manazil, Al Fargh al Thani and Batn al Hut, and with the closing stretch of the Vedic nakshatra cycle at Uttara Bhadrapada and Revati, so all three lunar-mansion systems place a transition point, an ending giving way to a beginning, in almost exactly the same corner of sky, even though each counts its own stations in a completely independent sequence that does not otherwise line up degree for degree with the others.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Named as the emblem animal of the lunar mansion Kui (Legs) in the twenty-eight xiu list.
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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