Origin 433 BCE
The twenty-sixth mansion lies in Hydra as the crop or stomach of the Vermilion Bird. Linked to kitchens, feasts and the storing of food, it is generally auspicious for celebration and hospitality. The auspicious and inauspicious values attached to each lodge belong to the almanac tradition, printed for centuries in the annual almanacs used to choose dates for weddings, burials, building and travel. That tradition is continuous and well documented, and it is distinct from the astronomy that supplied its framework.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)18 du (about 17.7 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 StarUpsilon-1 Hydrae 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 Zhang (Extended Net)
Zhang (Extended Net) is the twenty-sixth 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, Zhang is assigned the Deer.
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.
Zhang, the Extended Net of the Vermilion Bird
Zhang, the Extended Net, is the twenty-sixth of the twenty-eight xiu and the fifth mansion of the southern palace, the Vermilion Bird. Its name refers to a drawn bow-net or the bird's crop, identified with stars in Hydra. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Deer. 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 heavens into four palaces of seven mansions each, the Vermilion Bird gathering the mansions the almanac assigns to summer. The bird's body is spread across these southern mansions, from the Well at its wing to the Chariot at its tail.
Zhang's bow-net or crop imagery continues the bird-body naming convention that runs through the whole southern palace, from Jing at the wing through Xing at the neck to this mansion nearer the tail, a consistency of figure across seven consecutive stations matched, in the eastern palace, by the dragon's horn-neck-root-chamber-heart-tail sequence and, in the northern palace, by the tortoise-and-serpent imagery running through Dou to Bi, showing all four Chinese palaces were composed with the same deliberate body-part logic rather than assembled as unrelated lists.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Named as the emblem animal of the lunar mansion Zhang (Extended Net) in the twenty-eight xiu list.
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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