Tiānguān tú 天官圖
Diagrams of the Celestial Offices by 張汝璧 (撰)
About the work
The Tiānguān tú is a Qīng-period one-juǎn set of celestial diagrams attributed to Zhāng Rǔbì 張汝璧. “Tiānguān” 天官 (“celestial offices”) is the canonical term from the Shǐjì 史記 Tiānguān shū 天官書 of 司馬遷 Sīmǎ Qiān for the system that maps the sky’s asterisms (xīngguān 星官) onto the imperial bureaucracy by analogy: each office in the imperial government has a corresponding asterism, whose brightness, motion and conjunctions are read for portents about the office’s terrestrial counterpart. The Tiānguān tú renders this Hàn-canonical doctrine as a set of mapped diagrams.
Abstract
Composition window: Qīng dynasty (1644–1911); no narrower date recoverable from catalog or author records. The work is a representative of the Qīng “popular zǐbù tiānwén” sub-genre — short single-juǎn diagram-based works produced for the use of shìdàfū readers and minor temple officials. It builds on the canonical Shǐjì Tiānguān shū and on the Jìnshū tiānwén zhì 晉書天文志 (the elaborate Táng Jìnshū astronomical treatise edited by 李淳風), which together form the orthodox medieval Chinese inventory of celestial offices.
The text is preserved in the Sìkù wèishōu shū jíkān 四庫未收書輯刊 and is reprinted in the Zhōngguó kēxué jìshù diǎnjí tōnghuì (catalog refid KX03-07-010). It is consulted by historians as one of several late-traditional reductions of the canonical celestial-office system to a usable diagram-set, alongside the (much larger) star-maps of the Jesuit collaboration era (cf. KR3fa021 Xīnzhì línɡtái yíxiàng zhì).
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language translation located.
- Pankenier, David W. 2013. Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven. Cambridge: CUP. — the principal English-language treatment of the canonical Tiān-guān system and its political-astrological semantics.
- Pan Nai 潘鼐. 1989. Zhōngguó héngxīng guāncè shǐ 中國恆星觀測史. Shanghai.
- Sun Xiaochun and Jacob Kistemaker. 1997. The Chinese Sky During the Han. Leiden: Brill.