What is Mian Xiang?
Mian Xiang (面相) is the classical Chinese tradition of face reading. It maps the face onto the Twelve Palaces (twelve life domains) and the Five Officers (brows, eyes, nose, mouth, ears) and reads features for what they suggest about temperament and life path. It dates back over a thousand years.
Mian Xiang is part of the broader Chinese physiognomy tradition (相術), with documented practice since at least the Han dynasty. The system that became modern Mian Xiang was substantially shaped in the Song dynasty by the Daoist hermit Chen Tuan (陳摶, c. 871-989), with the canonical text Ma Yi Shen Xiang associated with him. A second classical text, Liu Zhuang Shen Xiang, arrived in the Ming dynasty.
A Mian Xiang reading works at three layers. The Five Officers (五官) are the five most expressive features of the face. The Twelve Palaces (十二宮) map twelve zones of the face onto twelve life domains (Life Palace, Career Palace, Wealth Palace, Marriage Palace, and so on). The Three Stops (三停) read the face in three vertical zones for early, middle, and late life.
The tradition lives today as a folk practice, a commercial reading service, and an object of academic study, particularly in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora.
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Get a Mian Xiang reading from your own selfie. The Twelve Palaces and the Five Officers, rendered as an editorial chart you can save.
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