Origin 433 BCE
The ninth mansion lies in Capricornus and is tied to the tale of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, separated across the Milky Way and allowed to meet once a year. It governs labour, patience and diligence, and is read with mixed omen in the almanacs. The story is attached to the lodge rather than derived from it, and it is among the clearest cases in the set of a narrative tradition growing up around an astronomical marker long after the marker itself was fixed. The lodge sits in a faint stretch of Capricornus and its determinative star is not a bright one, which holds for several lodges of the northern palace and made them harder to use than the conspicuous lodges east and west.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)8 du (about 7.9 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 StarBeta Capricorni 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
PalaceBlack Tortoise of the North 1 Learn More
The Lunar Mansion Niu (Ox)
Niu (Ox) is the ninth 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 Black Tortoise of the North, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the north, 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, Niu is assigned the Ox.
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.
Niu, the Ox of the Black Tortoise
Niu, the Ox, is the ninth of the twenty-eight xiu and the second mansion of the northern palace, the Black Tortoise. Its name means ox or ox-herd, identified with stars in Capricornus, and it is bound up with the beloved folk tale of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, the two lovers set among these stars and the neighbouring mansion. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Ox. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it marks a portion of the Moon's path. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu divide the sky into four palaces of seven; the Black Tortoise of the north gathers the mansions the almanac assigns to winter.
The Cowherd and Weaver Girl story anchored at Niu and the following mansion Nu is among the best known folk tales in the Chinese calendar, annually commemorated at the Qixi festival on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, when the two star-crossed lovers, separated across the Milky Way for the rest of the year, are said to be permitted to meet on a bridge of magpies; the tale gives this pair of otherwise technical lunar-mansion stations a living festival calendar presence that few of the other twenty-eight retain in modern popular practice.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Named as the emblem animal of the lunar mansion Niu (Ox) in the twenty-eight xiu list.
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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