Fortune Read Into the Temples Before Every Journey

The Travel Palace, qian yi gong, read from the temples at the outer edge of the forehead beside each eyebrow, covers a category of fortune that would have carried real weight in the world that produced the Shenxiang quanbian. Travel in Ming China was neither casual nor safe by default, a merchant's journey, an official's relocation to a new post or a scholar's trip to sit a provincial examination each carried genuine risk from banditry, disease and simple distance, and a palace specifically devoted to reading whether a coming journey was likely to go well answered a practical concern rather than an abstract one. Full, smooth temples are read as a sign of safe and beneficial travel, while sunken, discoloured or heavily lined temples are read as a caution against travel at that particular time.

Contemporary practitioners have carried the palace forward largely unchanged, since travel and relocation remain recognizable concerns even though their risks have shifted from banditry and disease toward the more mundane hazards of modern transit, one of the more direct continuities in a system that has reinterpreted several of its other palaces, the Servants Palace among them, more substantially to match a changed society.