Supreme Palace Enclosure

The second of the three enclosures of the traditional Chinese sky sits well south of the pole, in the region the Western charts give to Virgo, Leo and Coma Berenices, and it is not a palace but an administration. The Supreme Palace Enclosure is the celestial court in session: its stars carry the titles of ministers and excellencies, generals and counsellors, and its walled space encloses thrones and seats of judgement.

Where the Greek sky in this same region sees a maiden holding an ear of grain, the Chinese sky sees the machinery of good government at work around the seat of the sovereign. The naming is not decoration. The traditional sky was a working model of the state, and the stars of the enclosure gave the court's astronomers a vocabulary for events: a comet crossing the enclosure, a planet lingering near a minister's star, a guest star flaring beside a throne, each could be logged and read against the health of the actual administration. Centuries of such observations survive in the official histories, which is one reason Chinese records are among the longest continuous astronomical archives on earth. The enclosure culminates in spring evenings, standing high when its region of sky crosses the meridian, the season the histories associate with audiences, appointments and the ordering of the civil year.

The Supreme Palace Enclosure, Taiwei Yuan, is the middle of the three enclosures in both position and character, standing between the sealed palace at the pole and the open marketplace of the summer sky. Its plan is legible even in outline. Two chains of stars form the left and right walls, each star an official ranked by title, and the space between them holds the emperor's seat with the figures of the inner government arranged around it. The scheme is inherited from the star lists of Shi Shen and Gan De, the fourth century BCE astronomers whose separate catalogues the imperial astronomers later collated into a single map of the sky. In the composite map every star belongs to an asterism and every asterism to a jurisdiction, so the enclosure functions as a district of the celestial state rather than a picture. What a modern observer can take from it is a different way of seeing a familiar patch of sky.

The bright star the West calls Regulus, the little king at the heart of Leo, stands near the western approaches of the enclosure, and Virgo's Spica shines to its southeast; the same lights the Greek tradition wove into a lion and a maiden, the Chinese tradition read as gates, officials and the business of rule. The atlas keeps both readings, in their own registers, without ranking either.