West-Northwest

West-northwest is a bearing of 292.5 degrees, midway between west and northwest. It is the last of the eight secondary intercardinal points. One further practical matter is worth recording alongside them. Bearings can be given as true, relative to the geographic pole, as magnetic, relative to the magnetic pole, or as grid, relative to the vertical lines of a map projection, and the three differ; navigators and surveyors convert between them routinely.

Historical alignments of buildings and monuments are normally reported as true bearings and are compared against the astronomical positions of the period, since the sky itself has shifted with precession over the millennia. Any claim that an ancient structure is aligned to a compass point should specify which kind of bearing is meant and against what date, since an alignment stated loosely can be made to fit almost anything.

West-northwest, at 292.5 degrees, sits on the boundary between the mountain Xin, a heavenly stem lying just north of due west, and the mountain Xu, the branch of the dog.

The luopan divides the horizon into twenty-four mountains of fifteen degrees, built from twelve earthly branches, eight heavenly stems and four corner trigrams. The European rose divides it into thirty-two points by halving. Beyond the eight principal directions the two have no shared readings at all, and each of the eight secondary points of the sixteen-point rose falls on a seam between mountains, this one included.

Xu, the dog, is one of the four storehouse branches, the gathering position of the Fire phase, and it stands between due west and Qian, the northwest corner trigram, whose arc begins at 307.5 degrees. In the reckoning of hours Xu is the double hour from seven in the evening to nine.

Anyone comparing a Western directional correspondence with a Chinese one at this bearing is therefore comparing two things that are not the same size. The rose point is a bearing; the mountain is an arc with an animal, an hour, a month and a phase attached to it. Reducing the mountain to a number in degrees loses most of what it carries, and expanding the rose point to fill a mountain attributes to it a body of meaning it never had.