Chinese hand reading

This page reports one Chinese source and treats it as its own system. The text is the hand section of the Qing encyclopedia Gujin tushu jicheng (1726), volume 640, which quotes the Ming work Shenxiang quanbian. The transcription comes from Chinese Wikisource, whose typed layer is licensed CC BY-SA. The quoted line, in our own wording, says lines in the hand are like the grain of wood.

The encyclopedia says a hand should not lack lines, and that fine, deep lines are favorable and coarse, shallow ones are not. It names three main palm lines. The upper corresponds to heaven, the ruler and the father, the middle to the human world, and the lower to earth, the minister and the mother. A related passage on three talent lines links heaven, earth and human to foundation, wealth and blessings, and says to look to other lines, a longevity line among them, when the first shows nothing.

The method it states begins with the eight trigrams, then the five elements, then finger length and palm thickness. Of the hand it says slender, long ones go with a kind and giving nature and short, thick ones with a grasping one. It also reads the colors of the palm, with blue-green for worry or alarm, red for official business and yellow for happy occasions. The source names its three main lines for heaven, the human world and earth, not as the life, head and heart lines, so nothing here maps onto the Western lines. Its remarks on fortune and length of life are classical claims, not forecasts for anyone.

Two Western books of the period also report Chinese practice, and both are outside accounts of the thumb. Heron-Allen 1885 describes a Chinese method of reading the print of the thumb in soft wax or ink, and Benham 1900 says the Chinese have an intricate system based on the fine ridges of the thumb's first phalanx. This page does not draw on them beyond noting them.