Luoshu Square
Chinese name for a specific 3×3 magic square occurring in legendary accounts of the creation of Chinese writing and culture
The Luoshu (pinyin), Lo Shu (Wade-Giles), or Nine Halls Diagram is an ancient Chinese diagram and named for the Luo River near Luoyang, Henan. The Luoshu appears in myths concerning the invention of writing by Cangjie and other culture heroes. It is a unique normal magic square of order three. It is usually paired with the River Map or Hetu—named in reference to the Yellow River—and used with the River Map in various contexts involving Chinese geomancy, numerology, philosophy, and early natural science.
Traditions
The Lo Shu is part of the legacy of ancient Chinese mathematical and divination (cf. the I Ching 易經) traditions, and is an important emblem in Feng Shui (風水)—the art of geomancy concerned with the placement of objects in relation to the flow of qi (氣), or "natural energy".
History
A Chinese legend concerning the pre-historic Emperor Yu (夏禹) tells of the Lo Shu, often in connection with the Yellow River Map (Hetu) and the eight trigrams. In ancient China there is a legend of a huge deluge: the people offered sacrifices to the god of one of the flooding rivers, the Luo river (洛河), to try to calm his anger. A magical turtle emerged from the water with the curiously unnatural Lo Shu pattern on its shell: circular dots representing the integers one through nine are arranged in a three-by-three grid.
Early records dated to 650 BCE are ambiguous, referring to a "river map", but clearly start to refer to a magic square by 80 CE, and explicitly give an example of one since 570 CE. Recent publications have provided support that the Lo Shu Magic Square was an important model for time and space.
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This entry incorporates text from “Luoshu Square” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.