Chinese Xiu (Mansions)
White Tiger of the West
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Origin 433 BCE
The nineteenth mansion lies in Taurus around the Hyades. Shaped like a hunting or bird net, it governs the hunt, rain and matters of the frontier, and was watched for omens of border affairs. A line in the Book of Songs associates the moon's arrival at this lodge with heavy rain, and it stands among the earliest literary references to a mansion by name. Early sources of that kind name individual lodges without setting out the complete ordered series, which appears later. The Hyades form a compact V that is easy to identify, and lodges anchored on such distinctive groups are the ones whose identifications have remained stable across the whole transmission.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)16 du (about 15.8 degrees of equatorial arc) 2Tradition: Han-era Shi Shen tradition (Kaiyuan Zhanjing) Du: the arc-degree unit of the classical Chinese calendar, where a full circle equalled 365 and a quarter du (about 0.9856 modern degrees per du). This width is the Han-era figure standardized under the Taichu calendar and preserved in the Tang-dynasty Kaiyuan Zhanjing's Shi Shen star table; later dynasties recorded small revisions as precession shifted the determinative stars, so this is one epoch's figure, not a timeless constant. It measures the mansion's extent along the celestial equator (right ascension), the coordinate system Chinese astronomy actually used, not a position on the ecliptic (tropical zodiac); the atlas has no sourced mapping from this equatorial system onto a start point in ecliptic longitude, so this figure alone cannot be substituted into a start-end boundary range the way the equal Arabic-mansion spans are. Determinative StarEpsilon Tauri 2Tradition: Han-era Shi Shen tradition (Kaiyuan Zhanjing) Origins
Origin Period433 BCE 1Tradition: Chinese equatorial astronomy Origin PeriodThe full set of twenty-eight lunar mansions is attested together for the first time on the lacquer box from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, sealed in 433 BCE, the earliest surviving object to record the complete list of names. 1 Origin of the NameThe English "lunar mansion" is borrowed from the Indian nakshatras and the Arabic manazil and misdescribes the xiu. A xiu is a lodge marked by a determinative star and measured in right ascension along the celestial EQUATOR; it is not a division of the Moon's ecliptic path, and the three systems are not variants of one scheme. 2 Attributions
PalaceWhite Tiger of the West 1 Learn More
The Lunar Mansion Bi (Net)
Bi (Net) is the nineteenth of the twenty-eight xiu, the lunar mansions of traditional Chinese astronomy. Each xiu is a segment of the sky marked by a group of stars near the celestial equator, and together they divide the heavens into the belt through which the sun, moon and planets appear to move.
Palace, animal and place in the sky
This mansion belongs to the White Tiger of the West, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the west, one of the four symbolic creatures among which the twenty-eight are shared out seven to each. In the later scheme that pairs every mansion with a creature, Bi is assigned the Crow.
The twenty-eight mansions are among the oldest elements of Chinese sky-lore, attested well before the common era and used to track the nightly progress of the moon and to fix the calendar. The system is described here as that documented astronomical and calendrical tradition, from which its astrological uses later grew.
Bi, the Net of the White Tiger
Bi, the Net, is the nineteenth of the twenty-eight xiu and the fifth mansion of the western palace, the White Tiger, one of two mansions romanised Bi, this one meaning a hunting net or fork. It is identified with the Hyades cluster and stars in Taurus, including the bright Aldebaran. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Crow. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it marks a segment of the Moon's monthly path, and it was anciently associated with rain. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu order the heavens into four palaces of seven mansions each, the White Tiger of the west spanning the autumn quarter of the sky.
Bi the Net, first of the two mansions sharing that transliterated spelling, take its stars from the Hyades and Aldebaran, the same red giant the Arabic tradition names Al Dabaran, the follower, for its position trailing the Pleiades across the sky; three lunar-mansion systems therefore mark this single bright star from three independent naming traditions within only one or two mansions of each other in their respective sequences, a closer clustering of shared reference points than most other stretches of the ecliptic show.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Contained In
One of the seven lunar lodges of this palace.
Originates in Language
Sources
1. Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven
David W. Pankenier, Cambridge University Press, 2013On the twenty-eight lodges and the Zeng Hou Yi lacquer chest
2. Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth
Joseph Needham, Cambridge University Press, 1959Vol. 3, the section on astronomy: the hsiu (lunar mansions), the equatorial system and the du measureQuote, Vol. 3, the section on astronomy: the hsiu (lunar mansions), the equatorial system and the du measure
The twenty-eight lodges are equatorial divisions bounded by determinative stars and so of unequal width, measured in du on a circle of 365.25 parts; their relation to the Indian and Arabic lunar mansion systems is unresolved.
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