Mirror of Auras: Chen Tuan on Physiognomy

Livia Kohn is a scholar of Taoism, and this is her peer reviewed article, published in the journal Asian Folklore Studies, examining the Mirror of Auras, a physiognomy manual traditionally attributed to the tenth century Taoist figure Chen Tuan, alongside the wider debate over which physiognomic texts can actually be credited to him. Its strength is careful textual and attributional scholarship, Kohn treats Chen Tuan's authorship as a genuine historical question to be argued rather than assumed, examining the manuscript and attribution evidence directly. Its limit is that it is a focused article on this one text and this one attribution question, so a claim about Chinese physiognomy or face reading practice more broadly, beyond what this specific manual and its contested authorship can support, needs a wider source on the tradition as a whole.