Qian

Qian is the first of the eight trigrams (bagua) of the Yijing, the Book of Changes. It is composed of three unbroken yang lines, and its attribute is Heaven, the Creative, the pure yang principle of initiative, strength, and the generative power of the sky. In the family symbolism of the trigrams it is the Father. Its associated element in the Chinese system is Metal, and in the Later Heaven arrangement of the bagua its direction is northwest, though in the Earlier Heaven arrangement it stands due south at the top. Each trigram doubles or 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 Qian, all yang, is the counterpart and complement of the all-yin Kun.

The family and attribute assignments given here, and used throughout the eight trigrams, come from the Shuogua zhuan, the Explanation of the Trigrams, one of the Ten Wings of commentary traditionally appended to the Yijing and traditionally credited to Confucius, though the attribution is not accepted by modern scholarship; manuscript evidence places the text's compilation toward the end of the Warring States period or the early Han, a few centuries after the core divinatory text itself. Qian's status as pure yang gave it a further afterlife outside China: in 1701 the Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet sent Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, from Beijing, a diagram of the Fu Xi ordering of the sixty-four hexagrams, and Leibniz, who had already been developing binary arithmetic, recognised that unbroken yang lines and broken yin lines mapped onto his own 1 and 0; he published the correspondence in Paris in 1703, noting in his own words that Fu Xi appeared to have anticipated his binary system some four thousand years earlier.

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

The eight trigrams are set out in two standard circular orders, and they are not variants of one diagram. The Earlier Heaven arrangement, attributed to Fuxi, is symmetrical, with every trigram facing its exact opposite, and in it Qian stands in the south with Kun opposite in the north. The Later Heaven arrangement, attributed to King Wen, is the order used in nearly all applied work, from the classical commentaries to the compass schools of feng shui, and in it Qian sits in the northwest.

Nothing about the trigram changes between them. What changes is the question the diagram answers. Earlier Heaven describes an ideal and static cosmos held in balance. Later Heaven describes the world in motion, ordered by the turning of the seasons and the phases, and its positions follow that cycle rather than a symmetry.

In the Later Heaven order Qian belongs to the phase Metal, which it shares with Dui, and to the turn from late autumn into winter. The Shuogua, the Discussion of the Trigrams among the Ten Wings, supplies the rest of the standard set: among animals Qian is the horse, among the parts of the body the head, and in the family scheme it is the father, the trigram of unmixed yang from which each of the three sons takes its single yang line.

Read the two arrangements as two maps of the same eight things and the system holds together. Read them as one diagram and the directions contradict each other on the first comparison.

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