Chinese Xiu (Mansions)
Wei (Stomach)
Also Known As Wei
White Tiger of the West
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Origin 433 BCE
The seventeenth mansion lies in Aries. As the belly of the White Tiger it is associated with granaries, nourishment and stored provisions, and is generally an auspicious lodge for abundance. Indian tradition uses twenty-seven nakshatras in most schemes and twenty-eight in others, the additional one being intercalated; the Arabic system uses twenty-eight. Whether the Chinese twenty-eight, the Indian twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and the Arabic twenty-eight descend from one another or arose separately is a long-standing question that is still unsettled.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)14 du (about 13.8 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 Star35 Arietis 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
PalaceWhite Tiger of the West 1 Learn More
The Lunar Mansion Wei (Stomach)
Wei (Stomach) is the seventeenth 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 White Tiger of the West, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the west, 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, Wei is assigned the Pheasant.
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.
Wei, the Stomach of the White Tiger
Wei, the Stomach, is the seventeenth of the twenty-eight xiu and the third mansion of the western palace, the White Tiger, the third mansion romanised Wei, this one meaning stomach. It is identified with stars in Aries. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Pheasant. 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 several mansions sharing the romanisation Wei are distinguished in Chinese by different characters and meanings, tail, rooftop, and here stomach, though they fall in different palaces of the sky.
Wei the Stomach, third of the three mansions sharing that romanised spelling, sits in Aries alongside Lou, and Chinese court astrology of the imperial period read this pair together as governing granaries and stored grain, the stomach image extended from the individual body of the White Tiger to the collective provisioning of the state, a specifically administrative layer of meaning the equivalent stretch of the Vedic and Arabic lunar-mansion systems does not carry in anything like the same form.
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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