Qian

Mountain 23 of the twenty-four mountains (luopan) is Qian, one of only four trigrams placed on the ring, occupying position NW2, due northwest, 307.5 to 322.5 degrees. Qian is the Creative, Heaven, the Father in the family of trigrams set out in the Shuogua, the Discussion of the Trigrams, and it belongs to the phase Metal; its associated animal is the horse and its body part the head. Doubled upon itself Qian forms hexagram 1, The Creative, whose reading counsels sublime success to one who is persevering and upright, vigorous and principled action aligned with heaven.

Of the eight trigrams of the Bagua, only the four occupying the diagonal, ordinal directions, Qian, Kun, Gen and Xun, appear as named mountains on the twenty-four position ring; the four cardinal trigrams, Kan, Li, Zhen and Dui, are not separately inscribed because their own Later Heaven positions, north, south, east and west, coincide with the ring's four pure cardinal branches instead. In the Earlier Heaven (Fuxi) sequence, a second traditional arrangement of the same eight trigrams recorded separately in this atlas, Qian occupies the south, opposite its Later Heaven position of the northwest, a reminder that the twenty-four mountain ring follows only the Later Heaven scheme and not the Fuxi one.

Qian sits directly opposite mountain 11, Xun, twelve positions and a hundred and eighty degrees around the ring, itself one of the other three corner trigrams: the four ordinal trigram mountains pair off against each other in this way, Qian against Kun and Gen against Xun, the same Creative-Receptive and Mountain-Wind pairings the Yijing itself treats as complementary opposites. In compass school feng shui a sitting-facing pair built on a trigram mountain is read through the same basic method Stephen Skinner describes for the ring generally, back toward the sitting mountain and front toward its facing opposite, but a trigram mountain additionally carries its own hexagram, family member and Bagua attribute into readings that draw on the Yijing directly, a layer of meaning the branch and stem mountains, named for a zodiac animal or an elemental Day Master rather than for one of the eight trigrams, do not carry in the same way.

The four trigram mountains mark the diagonal points precisely because the ring's twelve branches already claim the twelve thirty-degree sector centres and its eight stems already claim the flanking positions around eight of those sectors, leaving the four ordinal gaps for the trigrams that complete the twenty-four. Compass school practice treats the fifteen-degree seam between one mountain and its neighbour as a real hazard, not a rounding error: a sitting or facing line falling exactly on that boundary, called an empty or straddling line, is read as drawing on the qi of both adjacent mountains at once rather than cleanly on one, and Stephen Skinner's account of the luopan treats avoiding a seam-line reading as one of the instrument's basic disciplines.