Lips and Mouth Section

Chen MengleiJun 2024

2.0

Word count: 25K words
Chapters: 18

Summary

Chinese traditional culture has a long intellectual history, marked by a high degree of originality, inventiveness, and literary quality. Early modes of thought are highly distinctive: religious theology, medical classics, ancient military treatises, Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, and Hundred Schools thought, feng shui and metaphysical learning, the Twenty-Four Histories, and local customs and gazetteers are all vast and profound in content. This series, "Essential Classics of Chinese Traditional Culture: Original Texts," preserves the appearance of the original books and focuses on conserving and transmitting traditional Chinese thought and culture. By reading the literary essence left by ancient sages, readers cultivate character and subtly come to appreciate the classics of Chinese learning.

Editor's review

This book belongs to the series "Essential Classics of Chinese Traditional Culture: Original Texts" and presents ancient documents in a form that preserves their original appearance. As a subject, the Chunkou men (Lip and Mouth Gate) concerns traditional physiognomy and folk taboo knowledge, offering a window onto ancient bodily concepts, folk beliefs, and everyday experience. Its value for reading lies not in verifying its divinatory conclusions but in treating it as cultural historical material: observing how ancients attached good and bad fortune to the shapes of lips and mouth, and how they linked bodily features to fate and ethics. The materials can be cross-referenced with gazetteers, customs records, and miscellaneous notebooks, helping readers understand how traditional society classified information and how oral knowledge was textualized. This publication emphasizes preservation and transmission and is suitable as reference material for folklore studies, cultural history, and lovers of Chinese learning, not as a practical physiognomy guide. Readers are advised to approach it with a questioning mind and to distinguish the historical context of the text from present-day scientific understanding.

Who it's for

A good fit for

General readers interested in traditional folklore and physiognomic culture
Students and researchers in folklore studies and cultural history
Readers who collect original Chinese classics and care about the preservation of ancient texts
Readers who want to understand ancient bodily concepts and taboo knowledge

Not a good fit for

People hoping to use this book to learn practical physiognomy for predicting fortune
Readers who accept only modern scientific explanations and reject traditional divination
Beginners who need systematic scholarly annotation and vernacular translation

Reading tips

Begin with the preface or publication note to confirm the source text and editorial format, then proceed to the main text.
Excerpt entries mapping lip and mouth features to fortune judgments by theme, making cards for easy cross-comparison.
Read alongside gazetteers and notebook literature to observe how physiognomic knowledge entered everyday discourse.
Mark unfamiliar terms first and consult reference works systematically, avoiding direct application of modern meanings.

版权信息
黄帝素问
金匮真言论
阴阳应象大论
六节脏象论
诊要经终论
热论
气厥论
风论
痿论
厥论
奇病论
气交变大论
五常政大论
至真要大论
灵枢经
导引
医案

FAQ

Is this book a practical manual for teaching face reading and fortune-telling?

No. It belongs to a series preserving original Chinese classics, and its value lies in preserving traditional texts as they are. The physiognomic content should be read as cultural historical material for understanding ancient bodily concepts and folk beliefs; it cannot serve as a basis for predicting fortune.

Can readers without classical Chinese training read it?

They can browse it, but will encounter obstacles. The book preserves the original appearance of the text and does not provide full vernacular translation, so terminology and style require some classical Chinese reading ability. It is advisable to use reference works or read the introduction first; beginners can start with short, clearly structured entries.

How does reading this book help with folklore research?

It provides a textual sample of physiognomic and taboo knowledge that can be used to examine how ancients classified bodily features and linked appearance to fate and ethics. Read alongside gazetteers and notebooks, it reveals how such knowledge spread among the people and became textualized.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Chen Menglei Author · China · 1651–1741

Chen Menglei (1651–1741), courtesy names Zizhen and Shengzhai, later styled the Old Man of Songhe, was a Qing dynasty scholar from Houguan, Fujian. He passed the imperial examination in the ninth year of the Kangxi reign and was appointed to the Hanlin Academy as a compiler. After 1698, by imperial order, he tutored the third prince, Yinzhii, and took the opportunity to compile a vast classified encyclopedia, the Hui Bian, using the collection of the Xieyi Hall; the Kangxi Emperor later bestowed on it the title Gujin Tushu Jicheng. The library holds more than 410 of his works, mostly sections of the officialdom chapters of that encyclopedia, covering institutions such as the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, the Imperial Observatory, the Ministry of Personnel, the Ministry of Rites, prefectural governors, the Transmission Office, and the Imperial Medical Academy. These works address ancient bureaucratic systems, ritual norms, and administrative practice. His compilations are distinguished by systematic classification and extensive citation, preserving a wealth of source materials for later generations; they are commonly categorized under culture and Eastern philosophy. As public information on his life is limited, this note confines itself to his known scholarly contributions.