Ji (Winnowing Basket)

Ji (Winnowing Basket) is the seventh of the twenty-eight xiu, the lunar mansions of traditional Chinese astronomy. Each xiu is a segment of the sky marked by a group of stars near the celestial equator, and together they divide the heavens into the belt through which the sun, moon and planets appear to move.

Palace, animal and place in the sky

This mansion belongs to the Azure Dragon of the East, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the east, one of the four symbolic creatures among which the twenty-eight are shared out seven to each. In the later scheme that pairs every mansion with a creature, Ji is assigned the Leopard.

The twenty-eight mansions are among the oldest elements of Chinese sky-lore, attested well before the common era and used to track the nightly progress of the moon and to fix the calendar. The system is described here as that documented astronomical and calendrical tradition, from which its astrological uses later grew.

Ji, the Winnowing Basket, is the seventh of the twenty-eight xiu and the last mansion of the eastern palace, the Azure Dragon. Its name refers to a fan-shaped basket for winnowing grain, formed by stars in Sagittarius. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Leopard. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it marks a segment of the Moon's path, closing the seven mansions of the dragon before the sky passes to the northern palace. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu divide the heavens into four palaces; with the Winnowing Basket the Azure Dragon of spring gives way to the Black Tortoise of the north and winter.

Ji closing the eastern palace at the Winnowing Basket completes a sequence of seven mansions whose stars, drawn from parts of modern Virgo, Libra, Scorpius and Sagittarius, cross constellation boundaries the way the equivalent stretch of Vedic nakshatras and Arabic manazil also do, each tradition cutting the same band of sky along its own lines. The basket-shaped asterism was also, independently of its calendrical role, associated in Chinese folk astronomy with wind, since a winnowing basket was the tool used to separate grain from chaff in a moving current of air.