Li stands in the east in the Earlier Heaven arrangement attributed to Fuxi, opposite Kan in the west. In the Later Heaven arrangement attributed to King Wen it moves to the south, and this is the position most readers will meet first, since Later Heaven is the order used by the classical commentators and by the compass schools of feng shui.
The southern placement is the clearest illustration of what the Later Heaven order is doing. That arrangement is organised around the year and the phases rather than around symmetry, so the trigram of fire and light belongs at the height of summer and at the quarter of the greatest heat. In Chinese orientation the south is also the direction a ruler faces, which puts Li at the front of the diagram as it is conventionally drawn.
In the Later Heaven order Li is the phase Fire outright, the only trigram to hold that phase alone. From the Shuogua it takes the pheasant among animals, for the brilliance of the plumage, and the eye among the parts of the body, since sight depends on light in the way the trigram's attribute of clinging depends on what it feeds on. In the family scheme Li is the middle daughter.
The two arrangements place Li ninety degrees apart, which is the sharpest reminder available that a bagua diagram means nothing until you know which order it follows.
Sources Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in ChinaRichard J. Smith with The I Ching, or Book of ChangesRichard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.), The Five "Confucian" ClassicsMichael Nylan