Qian is the first of the eight trigrams (bagua) of the Yijing, the Book of Changes. It is composed of three unbroken yang lines, and its attribute is Heaven, the Creative, the pure yang principle of initiative, strength, and the generative power of the sky. In the family symbolism of the trigrams it is the Father. Its associated element in the Chinese system is Metal, and in the Later Heaven arrangement of the bagua its direction is northwest, though in the Earlier Heaven arrangement it stands due south at the top. Each trigram doubles or combines with another to form the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing. These are the conventions of the Chinese cosmological and divinatory tradition, in which Qian, all yang, is the counterpart and complement of the all-yin Kun.
The family and attribute assignments given here, and used throughout the eight trigrams, come from the Shuogua zhuan, the Explanation of the Trigrams, one of the Ten Wings of commentary traditionally appended to the Yijing and traditionally credited to Confucius, though the attribution is not accepted by modern scholarship; manuscript evidence places the text's compilation toward the end of the Warring States period or the early Han, a few centuries after the core divinatory text itself. Qian's status as pure yang gave it a further afterlife outside China: in 1701 the Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet sent Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, from Beijing, a diagram of the Fu Xi ordering of the sixty-four hexagrams, and Leibniz, who had already been developing binary arithmetic, recognised that unbroken yang lines and broken yin lines mapped onto his own 1 and 0; he published the correspondence in Paris in 1703, noting in his own words that Fu Xi appeared to have anticipated his binary system some four thousand years earlier.
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