The face king · mian wang

In brief

The face’s seat of judgement, at the tip of the nose, and the one landmark the chapter names twice over. Above it lies the small intestine; below it the bladder and the uterus; and on it the colours of the two lower regions are read — in men a small-belly pain that reaches the testis, in women disease of the bladder and the womb, with the shape of the colour deciding whether the illness scatters or gathers. The name is political: the nose is where the face is governed, and the colours that appear there are the ones that concern generation. It is also the point at which the map turns from the viscera to the organs of reproduction, which is why the two paragraphs that follow are the most explicit in the book on the subject.