Kang (Neck)

Kang (Neck) is the second 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 Azure Dragon of the East, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the east, 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, Kang is assigned the Dragon.

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.

Kang, the Neck, is the second of the twenty-eight xiu and the second mansion of the eastern palace, the Azure Dragon of spring. As the Neck it marks the throat of the celestial dragon, identified with stars in Virgo. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Dragon. Each of the twenty-eight lunar mansions is defined by a determinative star from which its position is measured, and together they divide the band of sky the Moon and sun travel. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, distinct from the Indian and Arabic lunar-mansion systems though serving the same function of tracking the Moon: the twenty-eight xiu order the sky into four palaces of seven, each palace a great symbolic animal spanning one quarter of the heavens.

The determinative-star method used to fix Kang's boundary, measuring along the celestial equator from a single named reference star rather than dividing the sky into equal arcs, is the same principle underlying all twenty-eight xiu and is why the mansions are so unequal in width, some spanning only a degree or two and others many times that; the Chinese system shares this unevenness with the Arabic manazil, whose boundaries were likewise fixed from named stars, in contrast to the more strictly equal thirteen-degree-twenty-minute divisions of the classical Indian nakshatra scheme.