Reading the Supreme Palace

The Supreme Palace Enclosure, Taiwei Yuan, is the middle of the three enclosures in both position and character, standing between the sealed palace at the pole and the open marketplace of the summer sky. Its plan is legible even in outline. Two chains of stars form the left and right walls, each star an official ranked by title, and the space between them holds the emperor's seat with the figures of the inner government arranged around it. The scheme is inherited from the star lists of Shi Shen and Gan De, the fourth century BCE astronomers whose separate catalogues the imperial astronomers later collated into a single map of the sky. In the composite map every star belongs to an asterism and every asterism to a jurisdiction, so the enclosure functions as a district of the celestial state rather than a picture. What a modern observer can take from it is a different way of seeing a familiar patch of sky.

The bright star the West calls Regulus, the little king at the heart of Leo, stands near the western approaches of the enclosure, and Virgo's Spica shines to its southeast; the same lights the Greek tradition wove into a lion and a maiden, the Chinese tradition read as gates, officials and the business of rule. The atlas keeps both readings, in their own registers, without ranking either.