Origin 433 BCE
The twenty-seventh mansion spreads across Crater and Hydra as the wings of the Vermilion Bird. Associated with music, performance, travel and distant guests, it governs the arts and journeys abroad. It is among the widest lodges, which follows from the scarcity of bright stars in that quarter: where reference stars stand far apart, the lodge between them is correspondingly long. The southern palace holds both the widest divisions in the set and some of the faintest. The Wings and the Chariot together close the circuit, and both lie in a quarter that culminates in spring evenings for northern observers.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)18 du (about 17.7 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 StarAlpha Crateris 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
PalaceVermilion Bird of the South 1 Learn More
The Lunar Mansion Yi (Wings)
Yi (Wings) is the twenty-seventh 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 Vermilion Bird of the South, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the south, 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, Yi is assigned the Snake.
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.
Yi, the Wings of the Vermilion Bird
Yi, the Wings, is the twenty-seventh of the twenty-eight xiu and the sixth mansion of the southern palace, the Vermilion Bird. Its name means wings, fittingly the largest mansion by the span of its stars, identified with stars in Crater and Hydra as the outstretched wings of the celestial bird. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Snake. 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 mansion occupied by the Moon on a given night informing the almanac's reckoning of the day's character.
Yi being the largest of the twenty-eight mansions by angular span, spread across parts of modern Crater and Hydra, is a direct consequence of the determinative-star method: where two bright reference stars happen to fall close together, as at Zi, the intervening mansion is narrow, and where the nearest usable reference stars are widely separated, as here, the resulting mansion is correspondingly broad, an unevenness the equal-arc Vedic nakshatra scheme was specifically constructed to avoid by abandoning star-anchoring altogether in favour of fixed degree divisions.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Named as the emblem animal of the lunar mansion Yi (Wings) 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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