Chinese Xiu (Mansions)
Lou (Bond)
Also Known As Lou
White Tiger of the West
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Origin 433 BCE
The sixteenth mansion lies in Aries. Linked to gathering, herding and the muster of people or livestock, it is read as favourable for building, marriage and collective undertakings. The mansions served above all to record where the moon stood on a given night, the moon advancing roughly one lodge each night through a set of twenty-eight that approximates the twenty-seven and a third days of its circuit against the stars. The fit is close but inexact, and no scheme of whole lodges can make it exact.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)12 du (about 11.8 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 StarBeta Arietis 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 Lou (Bond)
Lou (Bond) is the sixteenth 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, Lou is assigned the Dog.
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.
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Named as the emblem animal of the lunar mansion Lou (Bond) 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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