Jing, the Well of the Vermilion Bird

Jing, the Well, is the twenty-second of the twenty-eight xiu and the first mansion of the southern palace, the Vermilion Bird, which holds the last group of seven and governs the direction south and the season of summer. Its name means a well, identified with stars in Gemini. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Wild Dog. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it tracks a segment of the Moon's monthly path. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu order the sky into four palaces of seven mansions each, the Vermilion Bird, a red phoenix-like bird, spanning the southern quarter of the heavens the almanac ties to summer and the height of yang.

Jing opening the southern palace at the height of yang, the season of summer, sits in Gemini among the same stars the Vedic tradition assigns to the tail end of Punarvasu and the opening of Pushya, another instance of the Chinese and Indian schemes drawing their mansion boundaries through a shared stretch of sky along quite different lines, since the two systems' equal-width and determinative-star methods of division rarely place a boundary at exactly the same degree even when the surrounding stars are identical.