Li is one of the eight trigrams (bagua) of the Yijing. It is composed of two yang lines enclosing a single broken yin line at the centre, and its attribute is Fire, the Clinging, associated with light, clarity, beauty, and that which depends on what it feeds upon, as flame clings to its fuel. In the family symbolism it is the Middle Daughter, and its polarity is yin. Its associated element is Fire, and in the Later Heaven arrangement of the bagua its direction is due south. Each of the eight trigrams combines with another to form the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing. These are the conventions of the Chinese cosmological and divinatory tradition, in which Li, bright and clinging, is the natural counterpart of the trigram Kan, the abyss of water.
In the Earlier Heaven or Fu Xi arrangement, an older and more static ordering of the eight trigrams than the Later Heaven sequence used for compass direction above, Li stands in the east rather than the south. Li's brightness has a practical afterlife in feng shui: the octagonal bagua mirror hung above doorways to deflect unfavourable influences carries all eight trigrams around its rim, generally in the Later Heaven sequence though some mirrors use the Earlier Heaven order instead, and the same eight trigram ring, in both sequences, appears on the face of the Luopan, the compass used to orient buildings by direction.
Sources Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in ChinaRichard J. Smith with The I Ching, or Book of ChangesRichard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.), The Five "Confucian" ClassicsMichael Nylan