Chinese constellations

Traditional Chinese astronomy has a system of dividing the celestial sphere into asterisms or constellations, known as "officials" (Chinese xīng guān).

The Chinese asterisms are generally smaller than the constellations of Hellenistic tradition. The Song dynasty (13th-century) Suzhou planisphere shows a total of 283 asterisms, comprising a total of 1,565 individual stars. The asterisms are divided into four groups, the Twenty-Eight Mansions along the ecliptic, and the Three Enclosures of the northern sky. The southern sky was added as a fifth group in the late Ming Dynasty based on European star charts, comprising an additional 23 asterisms.

The Three Enclosures (, Sān Yuán) are centered on the North Celestial Pole and include those stars which could be seen year-round.

The Twenty-Eight Mansions (, Èrshíbā Xiù) form an ecliptic coordinate system used for those stars not visible (from China) during the whole year, based on the movement of the moon over a lunar month.

The Chinese system developed independently from the Greco-Roman system since at least the 5th century BC, although there may have been earlier mutual influence, suggested by parallels to ancient Babylonian astronomy.

The system of twenty-eight lunar mansions is very similar (although not identical) to the Indian Nakshatra system, and it is not currently known if there was mutual influence in the history of the Chinese and Indian systems.

The oldest extant Chinese star maps date to the Tang dynasty. Notable among them are the 8th-century Treatise on Astrology of the Kaiyuan Era and Dunhuang Star Chart. It contains collections of earlier Chinese astronomers (Shi Shen, Gan De and Wu Xian) as well as of Indian astronomy (which had reached China in the early centuries AD). Gan De was a Warring States era (5th century BC) astronomer who according to the testimony of the Dunhuang Star Chart enumerated 810 stars in 138 asterisms. The Dunhuang Star Chart itself has 1,585 stars grouped into 257 asterisms.

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