Face Regions
Parents Palace
Palace
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Origin 1465 to 1620
The Parents Palace, or fumu gong, is one of the twelve palaces of mian xiang, the paired areas of the upper forehead above each eyebrow toward the hairline, traditionally called the sun corner on the left and the moon corner on the right. It is read as the seat of a person's relationship with their father and mother respectively, and of the parents' own health and longevity. Smooth, evenly matched fullness on both sides is read as a sign of a stable relationship with both parents and their good health, while an uneven, sunken or discoloured corner is traditionally read toward the parent it sits nearer. As with the rest of mian xiang, this is a traditional interpretive practice, not a finding of medical science.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodFixed in its present form by the Shenxiang quanbian, the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644) compilation Livia Kohn describes as the most complete and most widely available textbook of Chinese physiognomy, though face reading as a practice in China is attested centuries earlier. 1 Attributed Author / CompilerThe twelve palaces are part of the classical apparatus of Chinese face reading set out in the Shenxiang quanbian, described by Livia Kohn as the most complete and most widely available textbook of Chinese physiognomy, dated to the Ming dynasty, between 1465 and 1620, and drawing on earlier surviving material. 1 Origin of the NameGong, palace, is the term shared by all twelve areas in this scheme, casting each life domain as its own precinct of an imperial court mapped onto the face; the same architectural metaphor names the three courts and organizes mian xiang's reading of the whole head. 1 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 1 Learn More
A Sun Corner and a Moon Corner
The Parents Palace, fumu gong, is read from two separate, paired locations, the upper forehead above each eyebrow toward the hairline, and the system gives the two sides their own names rather than treating them as a single symmetrical feature: the sun corner on the left and the moon corner on the right. That naming borrows directly from the yin and yang cosmology running beneath much of the wider tradition mian xiang belongs to, sun standing for yang and moon for yin, and the palace applies the pairing to a person's two parents specifically, the sun corner read for the father and the moon corner for the mother, their respective health, longevity and the closeness of the relationship each side represents.
Smooth, evenly matched fullness on both sides is read as a sign of a stable relationship with both parents and their good health, while an uneven, sunken or discoloured corner is read toward the parent it sits nearer, so the two corners can in principle diverge, a strong sun corner beside a weaker moon corner reading as a closer or healthier tie to the father than to the mother. Few other palaces in the system split their reading by gender this explicitly, making the Parents Palace one of the clearest single points where the tradition's underlying yin and yang framework surfaces directly in a specific facial reading rather than remaining implicit background cosmology.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
One of the Twelve Palaces (shier gong), the facial zones each mapped to a specific life domain in Chinese physiognomy.
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