Face Regions
Earth Face Shape
Face Shape
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Origin 1465 to 1620
The Earth Face Shape, or tu xing lian, is one of the five element, wu xing, face shapes of mian xiang. It is described as broad, thick and squared, with a wide jaw and full, heavy features across a face roughly as wide as it is long, echoing earth's traditional association with solidity and support. Practitioners read this shape as belonging to someone steady, reliable and patient, matching earth's traditional qualities within the five phase system. As with the rest of mian xiang, this is a traditional interpretive practice, not a finding of medical science.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodTraced by Livia Kohn to Chen Tuan, the tenth century Taoist credited as a founder of Chinese physiognomy and traditionally taught by the legendary Hemp Robed Master, with the five shape scheme reaching its classical statement well before the Ming dynasty compilations that fix the twelve palaces. 2 Attributed Author / CompilerThe five element classification of face shapes belongs to the same classical apparatus, traced by Livia Kohn to Chen Tuan, the tenth century Taoist credited as a founder of Chinese physiognomy and traditionally taught by the legendary Hemp Robed Master, whose name the tradition also carries as the title of an older manual, the Ma Yi Shen Xiang. The fullest surviving compendium of this whole apparatus, the Shenxiang quanbian, is dated to the Ming dynasty. 2 Origin of the NameXing lian pairs xing, phase or element, with lian, face, following the same wu xing five phase vocabulary used throughout Chinese correlative cosmology for organs, seasons, directions and now facial morphology. 2 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category 2 Learn More
The Squared Shape at the Center of the Five Phases
Earth occupies a distinct structural position within the five phase system that the other four elements, arranged around it, do not share: where wood, fire, metal and water form a cycle each generating the next in sequence, earth traditionally sits at the center of the arrangement, the phase the other four pass through or rest upon rather than simply one more link in the chain. The Earth Face Shape, tu xing lian, described as broad, thick and squared, with a wide jaw and full, heavy features across a face roughly as wide as it is long, reflects that centrality in visual terms, a shape read as solid and settled rather than pointed or elongated the way the wood or fire shapes are.
Practitioners read this shape as belonging to someone steady, reliable and patient, qualities that match earth's own traditional association with solidity and support across the wider five phase framework, in medicine where the earth phase governs digestion and nourishment, and in astrology where it governs stability and endurance. The Earth Face Shape's own reading in mian xiang is therefore not an isolated physiognomic judgment about jaw width, it is one more application of a single, much older account of what earth as an element is held to mean wherever the five phase system appears.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
One of the Five Element face shapes (wuxing), classifying overall face form by the Chinese five element correspondence system.
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