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.