Face Regions
Servants Palace
Palace
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Origin 1465 to 1620
The Servants Palace, or nu pu gong, is one of the twelve palaces of mian xiang, read from the lower jawline along the sides of the chin. In its historical setting it named a person's fortune with servants and other subordinates; contemporary practitioners generally read it instead as the palace of employees, staff and anyone who works under a person's direction. A full, well fleshed jawline here is read as a sign of loyal subordinates and ease in managing others, while a thin, sharp or receding jawline is read as trouble commanding loyalty from staff. 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 Reading Built for a Society of Masters and Subordinates
The Servants Palace, nu pu gong, read along the lower jawline and the sides of the chin, preserves a piece of social history more directly than most of the twelve palaces do. Its historical claim named a person's fortune specifically with servants, a category that presumed a household economy organized around masters and the subordinates working under them, the kind of social structure Ming era compilers of the Shenxiang quanbian would have taken for granted rather than needed to explain. Contemporary practitioners have not discarded the palace, they have reread it, treating it now as covering employees, staff and anyone working under a person's direction, a reading that keeps the palace's underlying logic, fortune with people one has authority over, intact while updating the specific social relationship it describes.
A full, well fleshed jawline here is read as a sign of loyal subordinates and ease in managing others, while a thin, sharp or receding jawline is read as trouble commanding loyalty from staff. The palace stands as one of the clearer cases in the whole system of a fixed piece of interpretive vocabulary surviving a real change in the society that first produced it, carried forward by reinterpretation rather than by the underlying social relationship staying constant.
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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