Face Regions
Upper Court
Court
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Origin 1465 to 1620
The Upper Court, or shang ting, is the first of the three courts, san ting, into which Chinese face reading divides the face, running from the hairline down to the eyebrows. Practitioners of mian xiang read it as the record of inherited fortune, ancestry and the years of childhood and early youth, roughly the first three decades of life, and a full, unblemished forehead here is read as a sign of early advantage and a naturally quick mind. It is also called the Heavenly Court, tian ting, reflecting its place at the top of a system that maps the face's height onto a person's whole life span. As with the rest of mian xiang, this is a traditional interpretive practice within a living tradition, not a finding of medical science.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodExamined by Xing Wang as part of the general apparatus of Chinese physiognomy, xiangshu, in Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644) China, an apparatus she traces to a tradition credited to the tenth century Taoist Chen Tuan. 2 Attributed Author / CompilerThe division of the face into three courts belongs to the general apparatus of Chinese physiognomy, xiangshu, examined in Xing Wang's history of body divination in Ming China. That apparatus descends from a tradition credited to the tenth century Taoist Chen Tuan, traditionally said to carry forward the teaching of the legendary Hemp Robed Master whose name is also given to an older manual, the Ma Yi Shen Xiang, and it survives in its fullest compiled form as the Shenxiang quanbian, dated to the Ming dynasty. 2 Origin of the NameAlso called the Heavenly Court, tian ting, reflecting its place at the top of a scheme, san ting, three courts, that maps the face's height onto the whole span of a life. 2 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 2 Learn More
The Coarse Grid Beneath the Twelve Finer Palaces
The three courts, san ting, are the coarsest division mian xiang makes of the face, splitting it into hairline to eyebrows, eyebrows to nose base, and nose base to chin, and mapping that simple vertical span onto the whole arc of a life, roughly three decades to a court. Every one of the system's finer readings sits inside this grid rather than beside it. The twelve palaces, the five officers and the five element face shapes all occupy specific locations within one court or another, so a practitioner reading the Career Palace at the forehead's center is already reading within the Upper Court's own broader claim about inherited fortune and early life, and a reading of the Wealth Palace at the nose tip sits inside the Middle Court's claim about adulthood. The courts function less as a fourth independent layer of reading than as the coordinate system the other three layers are plotted onto.
Xing Wang's history of Ming era physiognomy situates this three part division within a much older Chinese habit of reading time onto the body, treating the face as a compressed timeline a trained eye could read start to finish in one glance. The Shenxiang quanbian, the fullest surviving compendium of the whole apparatus, preserves the courts as its organizing structure even where individual palace readings elaborate well beyond what the coarse three part grid alone could specify.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
One of the Three Courts (santing), the horizontal division of the face read for early, middle and late life fortune in Chinese physiognomy.
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