The seven bright stars that the West calls the Big Dipper or the Plough are, in the Chinese sky, Beidou, the Northern Bushel: a grain measure with a long handle, swinging around the pole through the night and through the year. The Han astronomical treatises give the asterism a role no Western reading of these stars ever carried.
The Records of the Grand Historian describe the Dipper as the carriage of the sovereign of heaven, which wheels about the centre and governs the four seasons, and Han texts preserve the observation behind the metaphor: at the same hour of the evening the handle points east in spring, south in summer, west in autumn and north in winter, so the Bushel is a clock face written on the circumpolar sky. Because the seven stars never set from Chinese latitudes, they were permanently available, to farmers as a season marker, to travellers as a pointer toward the pole, and to the state cult as the visible regulator of time itself.
The asterism sits within the Purple Forbidden Enclosure's district of the sky, adjacent to the palace it serves. This atlas keeps Beidou as its own entry, in the Chinese register, alongside the Great Bear of the Greek sky and the Foreleg of the Egyptian one, because the same seven stars carry three genuinely different figures, and the Bushel is the one that tells time.