Origin 433 BCE
The tenth mansion, the Girl or Maiden, is the Weaver Girl of the celestial romance and lies in Aquarius. It is linked to handicraft, women, service and marriage, and to the reunion of the parted lovers across the Milky Way. Each lodge also carries one of twenty-eight animals, here the bat, in a scheme used for selecting dates. That animal layer is a later accretion belonging to the almanac tradition and forms no part of the observational system, which is attested a great deal earlier and without it.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)12 du (about 11.8 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 StarEpsilon Aquarii 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
PalaceBlack Tortoise of the North 1 Learn More
The Lunar Mansion Nu (Girl)
Nu (Girl) is the tenth 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 Black Tortoise of the North, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the north, 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, Nu is assigned the Bat.
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.
Nu, the Girl of the Black Tortoise
Nu, the Girl, is the tenth of the twenty-eight xiu and the third mansion of the northern palace, the Black Tortoise. Its name means the girl or maidservant, sometimes the Weaver Girl of the folk tale told across this quarter of the sky, identified with stars in Aquarius. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Bat. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it tracks a segment of the Moon's monthly circuit. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu order the heavens into four palaces of seven mansions each, the mansion occupied by the Moon on a given night informing the almanac's reckoning of the day's auspicious or inauspicious character.
Nu's place in the Cowherd and Weaver Girl story, as the Weaver Girl herself in some tellings, sits beside Niu's Cowherd across the same stretch of Milky Way star field that the Arabic manazil, entirely independently, populated with its own ostrich-and-river imagery at Al Naaim a short distance further along the ecliptic in that tradition's own count, another case of two unrelated systems reaching for river and separation imagery in roughly the same visually striking region of sky.
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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