Translating 宿 *sukh/xiu and 舍 *lhah/she—‘lunar lodges’, or just plain ‘lodges’?#

Research Institute, and a fellow of Darwin College Cambridge. His current re-search interests lie in the field of early Chinese writings involving numbers in relation to calculation and to understanding the natural world. He is General Editor of the Science and Civilisation in China series.] In pre-modern China, people who made observations of the positions of heavenly bodies, or who did calculations about those positions, fre-quently used as a reference frame a system that sliced the heavens into twenty-eight unequal divisions, ranging in width from over 30 degrees to around 2 degrees. Each of these divisions shared its name with a particu-lar asterism, whose westernmost star marked the start of the division in question. This system is first fully evidenced in quantitative form in the Western Han, although the asterisms themselves are attested as a com-plete set in a depiction from the fifth century BC: see Wang Jianmin 王 健 民, Liang Zhu 梁 柱 et al. (1979). The Chinese phrase most commonly used to refer to this system of celestial divisions and asterisms is èr shí b