The Vermilion Bird and the four celestial creatures of China
Zhuque, the Vermilion Bird of the south, with the Azure Dragon, the White Tiger and the Black Warrior: the four creatures dividing the Chinese sky.
Chinese astronomy never adopted the Greek constellations. For millennia it organised the sky according to its own system, divided into palaces, lunar mansions and hundreds of small asterisms. At the heart of this vision stand four great symbolic animals, one for each cardinal point, guarding the four parts of the celestial vault. Among them, in the south, flies the Vermilion Bird, Zhuque, creature of fire and summer.
Four animals for four directions
The system of the four creatures assigns to each direction an animal, a colour, a season and one of the five elements. In the east is the Azure Dragon, Qinglong, linked to spring and wood; in the west the White Tiger, Baihu, linked to autumn and metal; in the north the Black Warrior, Xuanwu, depicted as a tortoise entwined with a snake and linked to winter and water; in the south the Vermilion Bird, linked to summer and fire.
Each creature includes seven of the twenty-eight lunar mansions, the xiu, sectors of the sky that the Moon crosses in its monthly course. The system is very old: a lacquered box found in 1978 in the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, in Hubei province, dating to around 433 BC, already bears the names of the twenty-eight mansions, together with the figures of a dragon and a tiger.
The seven mansions of the Bird
The seven southern mansions occupy an area of the sky that in Western tradition corresponds partly to Gemini, Cancer, Hydra, Crater and Corvus. Their names are evocative: the Well, the Ghost, the Willow, the Star, the Extended Net, the Wings and the Chariot. According to ancient texts some recall parts of the bird's body, such as the beak, the neck and the wings; the Star mansion includes bright Alphard, in Hydra.
In the Shiji, the great historical work of Sima Qian written around 100 BC, the chapter devoted to the celestial offices describes the southern palace of the sky and its red bird. The Huainanzi, a philosophical compendium of the second century BC, also places the four creatures within the system of cosmic correspondences. In the Han period the four figures also appear on bronze mirrors, roof tiles and funerary reliefs, a sign of a spread that went far beyond the circle of court astronomers.
Not just any phoenix
The Vermilion Bird is often confused with the fenghuang, the marvellous bird translated in the West as the “Chinese phoenix”. They are, however, distinct figures: the fenghuang is a symbol of harmony and good government, linked to the empress, while Zhuque is the astral guardian of the south. Both, at any rate, are creatures of extraordinary beauty, with resplendent plumage.
The four creatures played an important role in architecture and geomancy. They were painted on tomb walls, as in the Kitora tomb in Japan, of the seventh or eighth century, whose ceiling also preserves a star map. The Zhuque Gate marked the southern entrance of the imperial city of Chang'an, the Tang capital, and the same layout was imitated at Heian-kyō, today's Kyoto.
The Vermilion Bird therefore represents, in the Chinese sky, the warmth of summer and the light of midday. Together with the other three animals it forms an ordered image of the cosmos, in which stars, seasons and earth correspond to one another. A vision different from the Greek one, but equally able to turn the sky into a bestiary of symbols.