The Chinese geomantic compass, the luopan, divides the horizon into twenty-four mountains rather than sixteen or thirty-two points. Each mountain spans fifteen degrees, and the ring is built from the twelve earthly branches, eight of the ten heavenly stems, and the four trigrams that hold the corners.
Because twenty-four does not divide evenly against sixteen, the two systems interleave rather than align. North-northeast, at 22.5 degrees, falls exactly on the boundary between the mountain Gui, a heavenly stem occupying the arc just east of due north, and the mountain Chou, the branch of the ox. Every one of the eight secondary points of the European rose lands on a mountain boundary in the same way, and none of them lands on a mountain centre. The two divisions of the horizon share only the four cardinals and the four intercardinals.
That matters in practice as well as arithmetically. A luopan is read to a mountain, not to a boundary, and a sitting or facing direction taken exactly on the line between two mountains is not a usable reading in the compass schools: it is ambiguous by construction, and the traditions treat such a line as something to move off rather than to build on.
The branch Chou also names a double hour, one in the morning to three, and a month, so the same character on the ring carries a direction, a time of day and a season at once. That layering is what a luopan is for.