財帛宮 · 準頭
Nose · Jaebaekgung (Wealth Palace, 財帛宮)
Rising at the exact center of the face, the nose is the gravity point of a frontal impression. Traditional plates named every stretch of it, and the twelve-palace scheme is said to have talked of the nose as the seat of wealth.
Psychology reads something else here: how the first feeling drops anchor at the visual center and pulls every later judgment toward itself.
Editorial markA plate for examining the names a culture placed on the face.
Location plate
The terrain at the center of the face
On the vertical midline of the plate, the nose is the most densely named stretch. In the traditional thirteen-part vocabulary, the root between the eyes is san-geun (山根, ‘mountain root’), the mid-bridge points are yeonsang (年上) and susang (壽上), and the rounded tip is jundu (準頭).
Anatomically the upper bridge rides on the nasal bones and the lower half on cartilage, which is why the same nose reads so differently with angle and lighting.
- Plate label
- 財帛宮 · 準頭
- Anatomical term
- nose (nasal bridge and tip)
Name and tradition
The spot they called the wealth palace
Among the twelve palaces listed in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture's gwansang entry, jaebaek (財帛) is the palace of wealth. Traditional charts are said to have mapped the nose tip and nostril wings to this palace, likening them to a storehouse.
In the ‘five peaks’ chart the nose is the central mountain, and the old rhetoric about a sturdy central peak folded into the wealth story. It is a culture's metaphor, and the shape of a nose is not used to judge anyone's means.
Psychology in contrast
Where the gaze drops anchor
Anchoring, described by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1974, is the bias where the first value or impression becomes an anchor and later judgments only adjust around it.
In a frontal view the nose is the center the gaze keeps returning to, so it is exactly where a first feeling likes to drop anchor. The practical tip of the concept: check whether new information is only circling your first read, and haul the anchor up once.
Texts and research
Sources for this plate
- Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, ‘Gwansang’ entry: the jaebaek (財帛) palace
- The san-geun, yeonsang, susang, and jundu labels of the thirteen-part midline chart (Mayi lineage, as customarily transmitted)
- Tversky & Kahneman (1974), Science 185: anchoring
Terms and further reading