When we were looking at star maps inside of Stellarium during class, I couldn’t help but think about how arbitrary all of the constellations seemed. If I didn’t know what shape to look for, I don’t think I would ever have found the same patterns in the sky. I decided to study the Chinese constellation system to see how and where it differentiated with the typical Hellenistic one.
The picture seen above is a map of the Chinese constellations. Ancient Chinese astronomers divided the sky ecliptic into four regions, known as the Four Symbols. Each symbol was assigned a corresponding animal: Azure Dragon for the east, Black Tortoise for the north, White Tiger for the west, and Vermillion Bird for the south. You could see how the Symbols matched up with the animals below.
Furthermore, each symbol contained seven mansions for a total of twenty-eight mansions. In this way, the Twenty-Eight Mansions reflect the movement of the Moon in a month rather than the Sun in a year like the Hellenistic system does. Each mansion is then marked by its own constellation, located approximately along the celestial equator.
As for the constellations themselves, also known as “officials,” there were in fact a few similarities between the Chinese ones and the Hellenistic ones. However, for the most part the Chinese constellations were smaller and quite different than their counterparts. In some places, the Chinese constellations made up parts of the Greek ones, such as in the case of the Greek Taurus and the Chinese Ox.
