Mian Xiang — Three Courts and Twelve Palaces (面相)
Mian Xiang — Three Courts and Twelve Palaces (面相) is a Chinese / TCM — Mian Xiang physiognomy body system as transmitted through the lineage Mian Xiang reads the visible face through three courts (上停, 中停, 下停) and named palaces that relate facial regions to life course, fortune, kinship, work, and material circumstances. Classical face manuals also organise the face through the five mountains, five officials, annual positions, and twelve-palace diagrams; this system uses the court and palace layer requested here. The face map is rendered as zones over the front-view head rather than as a claim that a palace is a separate anatomical organ.. This page lists every point in the system with sourced placements and links to cross-tradition correspondences curated for The Body Spiritual.
Open in interactive explorerPrimary sources
- Shen Xiang Quan Bian (神相全編) — Complete Compendium of Physiognomy (Chinese Text Project, Donald Sturgeon transcription and English-facing edition, ctext.org wiki chapter 905153) — Classical compendium sections on the three courts, five mountains, five officials, and face positions; the text distinguishes upper, middle, and lower courts by face region and life period.
- Ren Xiang Shui Jing Ji Quan Bian (人相水鏡集全編) — Complete Water-Mirror Collection of Physiognomy (Chinese Text Project, Donald Sturgeon transcription, ctext.org wiki chapter 990274) — Classical manual whose contents explicitly include the twelve-palace discussion, annual positions, three courts, and face-region interpretations.
- Lillian Bridges, Face Reading in Chinese Medicine (2nd ed., Elsevier, 2012, ISBN 978-0-7020-4314-7) — Modern English synthesis of Chinese face-reading maps, facial regions, and five-phase interpretations; used as secondary corroboration rather than as the sole authority for classical naming.
Known lineage variants
- Palace names, boundaries, and labels vary between Mian Xiang manuals and teaching lineages: for example, Life/Fortune, Career/Official Salary, and Estate/Property may be named or delimited differently, and some charts place additional palaces on the temples, cheeks, or mouth.
- The three-court boundaries are not a single pixel-precise standard. This map follows the common upper forehead, brow-to-nose-tip, and nose-tip-to-chin reading while retaining a small uncertainty radius for each zone.
- The source texts describe face regions, not normalized SVG coordinates. Coordinates here are an editorial inset projection inside the front-view head; anatomical-right is x < 0.5 under the corpus convention, and bilateral zones preserve that orientation.
- Palace readings are traditional physiognomic correspondences, not biomedical diagnoses or causal claims about character, health, or destiny.
Related systems
No other systems share this tradition label.