Origin 433 BCE
The twenty-second mansion opens the southern palace of the Vermilion Bird with stars in Gemini. Named for a water well, it governs water, law, justice and matters of drink, and is generally auspicious. This is one of the widest lodges in the set, spanning something over thirty du, and its width set beside the narrowness of the Turtle Beak shows how far the scheme departs from equal division. A zodiac divides its circle evenly; this system divides the sky by where the stars happen to fall. The Well is also the lodge in which the sun stands at the northern summer solstice in the era when the system was fixed, which gave it particular weight in calendar work.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)33 du (about 32.5 degrees of equatorial arc) 2Tradition: Han-era Shi Shen tradition (Kaiyuan Zhanjing) Du: the arc-degree unit of the classical Chinese calendar, where a full circle equalled 365 and a quarter du (about 0.9856 modern degrees per du). This width is the Han-era figure standardized under the Taichu calendar and preserved in the Tang-dynasty Kaiyuan Zhanjing's Shi Shen star table; later dynasties recorded small revisions as precession shifted the determinative stars, so this is one epoch's figure, not a timeless constant. It measures the mansion's extent along the celestial equator (right ascension), the coordinate system Chinese astronomy actually used, not a position on the ecliptic (tropical zodiac); the atlas has no sourced mapping from this equatorial system onto a start point in ecliptic longitude, so this figure alone cannot be substituted into a start-end boundary range the way the equal Arabic-mansion spans are. Determinative StarMu Geminorum 2Tradition: Han-era Shi Shen tradition (Kaiyuan Zhanjing) Origins
Origin Period433 BCE 1Tradition: Chinese equatorial astronomy Origin PeriodThe full set of twenty-eight lunar mansions is attested together for the first time on the lacquer box from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, sealed in 433 BCE, the earliest surviving object to record the complete list of names. 1 Origin of the NameThe English "lunar mansion" is borrowed from the Indian nakshatras and the Arabic manazil and misdescribes the xiu. A xiu is a lodge marked by a determinative star and measured in right ascension along the celestial EQUATOR; it is not a division of the Moon's ecliptic path, and the three systems are not variants of one scheme. 2 Attributions
PalaceVermilion Bird of the South 1 Learn More
The Lunar Mansion Jing (Well)
Jing (Well) is the twenty-second 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 Vermilion Bird of the South, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the south, 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, Jing is assigned the Wild Dog.
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.
Jing, the Well of the Vermilion Bird
Jing, the Well, is the twenty-second of the twenty-eight xiu and the first mansion of the southern palace, the Vermilion Bird, which holds the last group of seven and governs the direction south and the season of summer. Its name means a well, identified with stars in Gemini. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Wild Dog. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it tracks a segment of the Moon's monthly path. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu order the sky into four palaces of seven mansions each, the Vermilion Bird, a red phoenix-like bird, spanning the southern quarter of the heavens the almanac ties to summer and the height of yang.
Jing opening the southern palace at the height of yang, the season of summer, sits in Gemini among the same stars the Vedic tradition assigns to the tail end of Punarvasu and the opening of Pushya, another instance of the Chinese and Indian schemes drawing their mansion boundaries through a shared stretch of sky along quite different lines, since the two systems' equal-width and determinative-star methods of division rarely place a boundary at exactly the same degree even when the surrounding stars are identical.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Contained In
One of the seven lunar lodges of this palace.
Originates in Language
Sources
1. Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven
David W. Pankenier, Cambridge University Press, 2013On the twenty-eight lodges and the Zeng Hou Yi lacquer chest
2. Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth
Joseph Needham, Cambridge University Press, 1959Vol. 3, the section on astronomy: the hsiu (lunar mansions), the equatorial system and the du measureQuote, Vol. 3, the section on astronomy: the hsiu (lunar mansions), the equatorial system and the du measure
The twenty-eight lodges are equatorial divisions bounded by determinative stars and so of unequal width, measured in du on a circle of 365.25 parts; their relation to the Indian and Arabic lunar mansion systems is unresolved.
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