Like several other ancient civilizations, early Chinese astronomers did not immediately realize that the brilliant object seen low in the eastern sky before dawn and the equally brilliant object seen in the west just after sunset were one and the same planet. Ancient Chinese texts gave the morning apparition the name Qiming, opener of brightness, and the evening apparition another name, Changgeng, treating them for a time as distinct celestial phenomena tied to their different positions in the sky, a pattern of double-naming for a single planet's two appearances that also shows up independently in ancient Greek astronomy, where the morning star Phosphorus and evening star Hesperus were likewise eventually recognized as the same body, Venus. Once Chinese astronomers established the two apparitions were one planet, the unified name Taibai, the Great White one, an epithet describing the planet's exceptional brightness, became standard, and it is this unified planetary identity, elevated into a personal celestial official at the Jade Emperor's court, that produced Taibai Jinxing as a figure of religion and literature.
The Five Phases cosmology that assigns Venus to Metal and to autumn is a later systematic layer built on top of this basic identification, part of the broader Chinese project of mapping the five visible planets onto the five phases and four seasons rather than a separate observation about the planet itself. Taibai Jinxing's eventual gentle, elderly persona in popular fiction, distant from the raw astronomical fact of a blazing point of light in the dawn or dusk sky, shows how a scientific identification, once made, could be absorbed into an entirely different, personified literary imagination.