An Old Romanisation of a Chinese Asterism

Keun Nan Mun is a nineteenth-century western romanisation of a Chinese asterism name, of the kind that entered European star lists through Jesuit reports of Chinese astronomy and then through the compilations that drew on them. Romanisations of this period predate both Wade-Giles and pinyin and are not consistent from one book to the next, which is why such names are often difficult to match confidently to a modern Chinese designation, and why the same star can appear under several spellings in different lists. What can be said with confidence is that the name belongs to the Chinese rather than the Graeco-Arabic layer of star nomenclature, and that the star it labels is a minor member of the figure of Andromeda. No traditional planetary nature is recorded for it, and it plays no part in the interpretive tradition.

The Chinese asterism it likely renders belongs to one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions of Chinese astronomy, the xiu, whose stars were grouped into small named asterisms quite differently from the Greek figures laid over the same sky; a name surviving only as a garbled nineteenth-century romanisation, unmatched to any secure modern Chinese source, is a fair illustration of how much of that independent tradition reached Western star lists only in damaged, third-hand form.