White Tiger

The western palace holds seven lodges: Legs, Bond, Stomach, Hairy Head, Net, Turtle Beak and Three Stars, running from Andromeda and Aries through the Pleiades and the Hyades to the belt of Orion. It is the quarter that culminates in the evening in autumn, and it carries autumn, the phase Metal, the colour white and the direction west.

The correspondences are not decorative. Metal in the five phase system governs cutting, weapons, and by extension warfare, punishment and the frontier. Autumn is the season in which growth stops and things are harvested and killed. Chinese legal practice took that correspondence literally: capital sentences were, as a matter of imperial law over long periods, reviewed and carried out in autumn and winter rather than in spring and summer, on the reasoning that an execution in the growing season worked against the order of things. A quarter of the sky and a rule of criminal procedure were parts of one scheme.

The omen literature for these lodges follows the same logic. The Hairy Head lodge, which contains the Pleiades, and the Net, which contains the Hyades and Aldebaran, carry a heavy concentration of prognostications about armies, border incursions, and the affairs of the western regions, so that observations of that part of the sky were read as intelligence about the frontier.

The white tiger is therefore the most consequential of the four in practice. It is the one whose associations reached into government, and its quarter was watched by officials whose reports could start or delay a campaign.

The oldest surviving evidence that the twenty eight lodge system was already complete comes from a coffin chamber. The tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, at Suizhou in Hubei, was sealed in the late fifth century BCE and excavated in 1978. Among its contents is a lacquered clothes chest whose lid carries the names of all twenty eight lodges written around a central character, with a dragon painted along one side and a tiger along the other.

That object settles a chronology. The full lodge list, the four palace division, and the pairing of dragon in the east with tiger in the west were all in place well before the Han dynasty texts that describe them, which had been the earliest written evidence.

In siting practice the tiger is the right hand flank, facing outward, and the manuals read the two flanks against each other. The dragon on the left should be the higher and longer of the two; a tiger side that rises above it, or runs further forward, is treated as a site where the more violent influence dominates, and remedies are prescribed. The imbalance is discussed in terms of temperament, which is why the tiger acquired a reputation for restlessness that the tidy symmetry of the four emblems does not suggest.

The name also attached itself to institutions. A conference of scholars convened by an emperor in 79 CE to settle disputes over the classics met in a hall named for the white tiger, and the record of its proceedings is still cited under that name, a small illustration of how far the western emblem had spread beyond astronomy.