Chinese Xiu (Mansions)
Zi (Turtle Beak)
Also Known As Zi
White Tiger of the West
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Origin 433 BCE
The twentieth mansion is the smallest lodge in the set, formed by faint stars in Orion. It represents the head or beak of the White Tiger and is associated with brief undertakings, grief and matters quickly concluded. Its extreme narrowness, reckoned in some tables at barely a single du and in others at less, follows directly from its reference star lying almost alongside the star of the lodge that follows it. The unevenness is a consequence of using real stars as boundaries and was never treated as a defect.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)2 du (about 2.0 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. In 1752 (Qianlong year 17) the determinative stars of this mansion and of Three Stars (Shen) were reassigned to correct a precession-driven ordering swap that had crept in after the 13th century; Lambda Orionis is the post-1752 assignment still in modern use, not the original Han-era star. Determinative StarLambda Orionis 2Tradition: Han-era Shi Shen tradition (Kaiyuan Zhanjing) In 1752 (Qianlong year 17) the determinative stars of this mansion and of Three Stars (Shen) were reassigned to correct a precession-driven ordering swap that had crept in after the 13th century; Lambda Orionis is the post-1752 assignment still in modern use, not the original Han-era star. 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 Zi (Turtle Beak)
Zi (Turtle Beak) is the twentieth 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, Zi is assigned the Monkey.
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.
Zi, the Turtle Beak of the White Tiger
Zi, the Turtle Beak, is the twentieth of the twenty-eight xiu and the sixth mansion of the western palace, the White Tiger. It is the smallest of the twenty-eight mansions, identified with the faint group of stars at the head of Orion. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Monkey. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it tracks a narrow segment of the Moon's path. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu are of very unequal width, some, like the Turtle Beak, spanning only a degree or two, others far wider, because the mansions were defined by named asterisms and their determinative stars rather than by equal division of the sky.
Being the smallest of the twenty-eight mansions by angular width, Zi illustrates most clearly why the xiu are not, unlike the Vedic nakshatras, built on strictly equal arcs: because each mansion is anchored to a determinative star rather than to a fixed degree count, a stretch of sky with two named asterisms close together, as here at the boundary with Shen, produces one very narrow mansion and one correspondingly wider neighbour rather than the even thirteen-degree-twenty-minute segments the nakshatra scheme imposes regardless of what stars happen to fall where.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Named as the emblem animal of the lunar mansion Zi (Turtle Beak) 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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