This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Adam Smith's study of the Chinese sexagenary cycle traces the documented origin of the ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches, the naming system behind ancient Chinese calendars and, much later, behind twelve of the twenty four compass mountains, back to a real, dated ritual and calendrical practice rather than a symbolic scheme invented for divination alone.
That documented origin matters for a Twenty-Four Mountains entry because a mountain named for a Stem or a Branch carries that character's own separate, older documented history, first attested in calendar keeping centuries before it was ever applied to a compass, and an entry records that older layer of meaning honestly alongside the mountain's later feng shui use.
A Twenty-Four Mountains entry therefore records which of the three naming systems, Stem, Branch or trigram, a given mountain belongs to, and where useful notes that character's own separate documented history, since Smith's own research shows the stems and branches were a real historical system long before feng shui adopted them for compass reckoning. That layered history is part of what makes the compass a documented system rather than an arbitrary one.
Smith's account also traces the stems and branches to specific documented divinatory and ritual uses that predate feng shui by many centuries, evidence an entry can draw on to distinguish a mountain's inherited calendrical character from any meaning added specifically for compass reading.