This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
White Tiger of the West gathers the fifteenth through twenty first lunar mansions, the segment of the twenty eight lodge system read as the western quarter's guardian tiger.
Kui, the Legs, opens the palace with stars in Andromeda and Pisces, associated with the harvest storehouse and governing journeys and the gathering of grain; precession has carried every lodge in the set away from the positions its reference star held when originally chosen, and Chinese astronomers periodically reselected determinative stars to keep the system usable, so the names stayed fixed while the stars defining them did not. Zi, the Turtle Beak, is the smallest lodge in the entire set, formed by faint stars in Orion and reckoned in some tables at barely a single du, a narrowness that follows directly from its reference star lying almost alongside the star of the lodge that follows it. Shen, Three Stars, centers on the belt and body of Orion and closes the palace as the tiger's forelegs and body; in traditional literature it stands opposite the Heart lodge of the eastern dragon, the two never appearing in the sky together, and that real astronomical opposition became a common figure in Chinese poetry for estrangement between people who cannot meet.
Across the seven, the extremes of width in the set sit side by side, the almost immeasurably narrow Turtle Beak beside broader neighbors, each width a direct record of where the stars themselves happen to fall.