How the Twenty-Eight Mansions Map the Sky: Azure Dragon East, White Tiger West
Memorising the twenty-eight mansions was the most painful stage of my study of Qi Zheng Si Yu.
Not because it is difficult, but because it loops: Jiao, Kang, Di, Fang, Xin, Wei, Ji — by the third recitation my tongue was tying itself in knots.
Then someone gave me a mnemonic: treat them as one dragon. Jiao is the horn, Kang the throat, Di the foreleg, Fang the belly, Xin the heart, Wei the tail, and Ji is a winnowing basket.
After that it stuck at once.
What the Twenty-Eight Mansions Are
The twenty-eight mansions divide the circuit of the sky into twenty-eight regions, used to fix the positions of the sun, the moon, the five planets and other celestial bodies, and they also serve as the basis for observing the other fixed stars (Source 1).
By the Four Symbols they fall into four groups: the Azure Dragon of the east, the Dark Warrior of the north, the White Tiger of the west and the Vermilion Bird of the south. The seven mansions of the eastern Azure Dragon are, precisely: Jiao, Kang, Di, Fang, Xin, Wei and Ji (Source 1).
What Each Mansion Looks Like
The old writers gave every mansion a vivid image (Source 1):
Jiao: like the horn of a dragon.
Kang: like a dragon's throat and neck.
Di: like a dragon's foreleg.
Fang: like the belly chamber of a dragon.
Xin: like a dragon's heart.
Wei: like a dragon's tail.
Ji: like a winnowing basket.
Further on, among the seven mansions of the northern Dark Warrior, the Dipper mansion is "like the scoop of a ladle" and the Ox mansion points to the star Qianniu, and so on (Source 1).
According to the entry "Twenty-Eight Mansions" (《二十八宿》), each mansion also corresponds to a "determinative star" and to a Western name in the modern constellations: the Jiao mansion takes Spica as its determinative star, Kang 1 is Kappa Virginis, and Di 1 is Alpha Librae (Source 1).
When the Four Symbols Appeared
There is a fact that is often overlooked: the four images — Azure Dragon, Vermilion Bird, White Tiger and Dark Warrior — only began to be linked as a whole with the seven mansions within one quarter of the sky somewhere between the late Warring States period and the early Western Han (Source 1).
In other words, the twenty-eight mansions are the coordinates, and the Four Symbols are an image label added later. The two do not come from the same era.
How It Is Used in Divination
The twenty-eight mansions serve both astronomy and the calculations of traditional divination; in stellar-fate systems such as Qi Zheng Si Yu, the "degrees a luminary occupies within the twenty-eight mansions" are one of the bases for judgment (Source 1).
My own way of using them is very plain: memorise the Four Symbols first, then recite the seven mansions of each symbol in order until they are familiar, and only then bother with the degrees. The first two steps are the map; the third step is the route.
The difficulty of the twenty-eight mansions was never in memorising twenty-eight characters; it is in putting them back into the sky. Once the Four Symbols are in place, those names stop being a string of syllables.
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This article was last checked on 19 September 2026. Traditional divination has many schools and a long history, and their formulas and versions do not fully agree; the text relies on publicly verifiable sources, and for dates and calendars please refer to the latest official publication.
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Sources
- "Twenty-Eight Mansions" (《二十八宿》) — Wikipedia (including the seven mansions of the Azure Dragon, the animal images and the Four Symbols): https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/二十八宿 (accessed 19 September 2026)
- Method page on this site: Qi Zheng Si Yu: https://zhanbumizhi.top/en/methods/qizheng (accessed 19 September 2026)