The ancients marked out twenty-eight groups of stars in the sky, each called a lodge. The twenty-eight lodges were divided in turn into four sets, each matched with a creature: the Azure Dragon in the east and the Vermilion Bird in the south. This class reads the dragon and phoenix totems together with this kind of observation of the sky, though what the three sources below show directly is the dragon, the tiger and the Vermilion Bird.
Tomb M45 at Xishuipo in Puyang, Henan, from around 4400 BCE, has a dragon and a tiger laid out in clam shells, regarded as the earliest image of the dragon-tiger star symbolism.
On the lid of a lacquer box from the early Warring States tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng are drawn the Dipper and the full names of the twenty-eight lodges, with the azure dragon and the white tiger on either side.
In the Treatise on the Celestial Offices of the Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian divides the sky into four palaces, such as the Azure Dragon of the east and the Vermilion Bird of the south, and the dragon and the bird of the sky were given their own quarters in the book.
Constellations and Totems is the class in the chapter on the Cosmos on the lunar lodges and the dragon and phoenix totems: it reads totems such as the dragon and the phoenix together with the observation of the sky by the twenty-eight lunar lodges, drawing on the dragon and tiger laid out in clam shells at Xishuipo in Puyang, Henan; the lacquer box lid from the Warring States tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng with the twenty-eight lodges and the azure dragon and white tiger; and the four palaces of the sky named for the Azure Dragon, the Vermilion Bird and others in the Treatise on the Celestial Offices of the Records of the Grand Historian.
