頷厭 Hanyan
“Jaw Pressing” · GB4
Foot Shaoyang · 4 of 44 · crossing-point
Where. In the hair of the temple, a quarter of the way along the hairline curve from the forehead corner to ear-top level.
For. One-sided headache; dizziness; ringing ears.
Press. Gentle fingertip pressure on the scalp, about a minute each side.
頷厭二穴，在曲周下顳顬上廉按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Hanyan Sits Above the Temple Hair
The dataset locates Hanyan on the head above the temple hair, at the junction of the upper fourth and lower three quarters of the arcuate line connecting Touwei (ST8) and Qubin (GB7). Unpacked: imagine the curve the hairline traces around the temple, starting at Touwei — the point half a cun above the hairline at the temple corner, four and a half cun lateral to the midline of the head — and sweeping back and downward toward Qubin, which sits in front of the ear, level with the ear tip. Divide that curved line into four equal parts. Hanyan occupies the boundary between the first quarter and the remaining three, which is another way of saying it lies one quarter of the way along the arc from Touwei. A cun, as always in this literature, is a proportional measure taken from the person being examined, so the arc stretches or shrinks with the head it belongs to.
What rests beneath the fingertips here is gentler country than most chest or limb points offer. Above the temple hair the scalp glides over the temporalis muscle and the firm vault of the skull, so the searching finger meets softness, then smooth bone, with no ribs or organs anywhere close. That said, the temple region in general is well supplied with small vessels and nerves running just under the skin, which is one reason scalp work of any kind rewards patience and light contact. The point itself sits inside the hair-bearing scalp, so a search will mean parting the hair and reading the landscape mostly through the finger pads rather than the eyes. None of this needs force; the landmarks are generous.
The two named neighbours bracket Hanyan neatly. Touwei stands at the front and higher end of the arc, right where the forehead rounds into the temple corner; Qubin lies at the far end, tucked in front of the ear at ear-tip height, noticeably lower and further back. Hanyan belongs to neither extreme — it clings closer to the Touwei end, roughly a quarter of the curve away. Reading all three together turns a fussy coordinate into a simple shape: a crescent following the temple hairline, with Hanyan sitting early along its length, above the hair and clearly clear of the ear.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit somewhere comfortable facing a mirror if one helps, and begin by finding Touwei. Place a fingertip at the corner where the forehead meets the temple — the frontal hairline makes its sharpest turn there — then rise half a thumb-width straight up from the hairline edge. The spot you land on, at the top of that temple-corner curve, is where the dataset places Touwei. From there, let your finger follow the hairline as it curves backward over the temple, heading for the region in front of the ear where the far end of the arc, Qubin, waits level with the ear tip. You are tracing the very line the location description divides into quarters.
Now divide the stretch you traced into four equal parts in your mind — walking it off with two finger-widths at a time works better than measuring. Starting at Touwei, come back along the curve until you have covered the first of the four parts, and let your fingertip settle there, just above the hair, on the side of the head where scalp meets its gentle upward slope. Part the hair with the pads of your index and middle fingers and rest them lightly on the spot. Many people notice a faint dull awareness or mild tenderness there compared with a finger-width away; some notice little at all, which is normal too. Check the other side the same way, because the two arcs usually prove easy to match once the first is found.
Two slips account for most misses. The first is travelling too far back — past the halfway point of the arc, toward Qubin and ear-tip height — when Hanyan lives in the earliest quarter, much nearer Touwei. If you find yourself level with the top of the ear, you have gone too far; return to the temple corner and start the count again. The second is slipping below the hairline onto bare temple skin, which leaves the point behind; keep the fingertip above the hair edge throughout. When in doubt, retrace the whole sequence slowly from the temple corner, and let the ear-tip check confirm you have not drifted too far toward Qubin.
Reading the Name: Jaw Pressing
The two characters carry a compact image. Han 頷 is the classical word for the lower jaw and chin — the hinge region of the face. Yan 厭 is a verb of pressure: to press down upon, to bear on, and by extension to suppress or subdue. Read together, Hanyan suggests something like the pressing that reaches the jaw, or a place where pressure gathers over the head’s side and speaks to the face below. Commentators across the tradition have offered variations on the theme — some read yan as describing how the curving hairline presses down like a lid above the temple, others took the name as a hint that the point answers complaints of the head and jaw together. The licence of point-name poetry allows both; the shared core is pressure, connection, and the borderland where head meets face.
The dataset files Hanyan among crossing-points, and that office gives the name a second layer. Crossing-points are locations where classical channel theory describes more than one course of qi passing over the same ground, so the spot serves as a meeting room rather than a private address. Traditions differ on precisely which neighbouring channels were counted as joining here, but the recurring idea is convergence over this band of the temple: the great thoroughfares that run up the side of the head cross paths near the hairline, and Hanyan marks one of their waypoints. In that frame, a name invoking the jaw stops being odd — a point standing where courses converge can plausibly speak for territory beyond its own square inch.
Pinyin renders the name Hànyàn, and both syllables carry the same falling fourth tone: han dips sharply downward, and yan repeats the identical falling contour. The hanzi pair 頷厭 is rare enough to feel exotic — 頷 survives mainly in literary Chinese — yet small enough to memorise at a glance. Like many points along the head channels, it wears a name drawn from body imagery rather than architecture: gates and storehouses give way here to jaws, sinews, and angles of the skull. The name, read patiently, doubles as a location memo and a small thesis about what the point traditionally watches over.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded indications read: one-sided headache, dizziness, tinnitus, toothache, facial paralysis, neck pain, and convulsions. The first item explains why this point exists at all in the classical toolkit. The Gallbladder channel famously zigzags down the side of the head and body toward the fourth toe, and the lateral scalp is, in traditional geography, gallbladder-channel territory. A headache confining itself to one side was therefore read as disharmony along that lateral course, and classical practice naturally reached for points stationed along it — with Hanyan, high on the temple line, among the early candidates.
The middle items extend the same logic outward. Dizziness was traditionally grouped with rising disturbances along the wood-element pair of liver and gallbladder — five-phase thinking assigns both organs to wood, and many old case discussions describe wind stirring upward along these paired courses toward the head. Tinnitus follows from the pathway: classical descriptions have the channel winding over the temple and around the neighbourhood of the ear, so ear complaints belonged to points along its route. Toothache and facial paralysis reflect the crossing-point idea — converging channels made the temple band a vantage over the face below, and deviations of the mouth and eye were traditionally approached through such head-side stations. Neck pain, finally, tracks the channel as it leaves the head and descends the side of the body.
Convulsions deserves its own plain sentence. What the old records gathered under this term covered sudden spasms and fright presentations of many kinds; conditions of that character belong, today and always, in urgent professional hands, and nothing on this page suggests otherwise. It bears repeating that all seven indications are traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset and classical literature, offered for cultural and historical understanding rather than as promises. Where modern research touches self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and heavily context-dependent, and evidence specific to any single point remains thin. Hold the tradition as tradition, and hold the safety rules as rules.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point located by the walkthrough above, settle in: seated, shoulders released, head balanced rather than held. Curl your index and middle fingers together and rest the pads — never the nails — on the spot, letting the hair lie between skin and fingertip. Begin with contact alone for a few slow breaths, then add small, unhurried circles, letting the scalp glide minutely over the bone beneath instead of dragging the skin. Pressure should register as pleasant dullness, faint warmth, or a mild spreading ache — comfortable enough to forget you are exerting anything. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, and keeping the two sides symmetrical helps the session feel settled rather than lopsided.
Quality outranks duration here as everywhere in self-care. Light, patient, repeated contact suits a point whose whole identity is surface geography; hard grinding buys nothing and risks a tender scalp afterward. Warm your hands first on cold days, because chilled fingers make tense recipients. Choose a quiet moment rather than a screen-lit one, and let the practice ride the breath: soften on the exhale, ease off on any wince. People who keep such routines often anchor them to something existing — combing the hair, an afternoon tea, the pause before opening a laptop — because consistency, not intensity, is what the self-care tradition actually asks of anyone.
Treat the few minutes as a small ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Over weeks you might notice the temple area feels less guarded, that headaches arrive with less drama, or simply that you spent ninety seconds attending to your own head with some kindness — every one of those outcomes fits the honest scope of self-acupressure. What does not fit is escalation: pressing harder, longer, or more sharply to force a result. Curiosity pulling in that direction is the signal to return to gentleness, or to set the practice aside for the day. The point has waited above the temple hair for centuries; it will wait for tomorrow too.
Cautions and Safe Practice
A fair question follows the walkthrough: what does the licensed record warn about here? For this point, the answer is that the dataset records no specific caution — echoed faithfully in this module as an empty list. That absence is genuinely informative: unlike points over the chest or abdomen, nothing in the record flags special danger at this site, which matches the plain anatomy of scalp over muscle and bone. But absence of a recorded caution is not an invitation to force. Every general rule of self-care still stands, and the temple region’s busy population of small vessels and nerves argues for restraint all on its own.
The practical rules stay simple. Use finger pads, never nails, knuckles, or tools, and keep the intention in skin and superficial scalp rather than boring inward. Skip the point over broken, inflamed, or erupting skin, through fresh styling products nobody asked to grind around, and for a while after any blow to the head until ordinary activity is cleared with a clinician. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stop at once and do not retry that day. Pregnant readers, and anyone living with neurological conditions or a history of severe headache, should check with a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice — not because this point is flagged, but because individual circumstances deserve individual advice.
And the wider rule stands over everything: this page is educational, acupressure is self-care, and neither diagnoses nor treats disease. Seek prompt medical care — not a longer pressing session — for a sudden headache unlike any before it, headache with fever and a stiff neck, headache after a head injury, headache with weakness, vision or speech changes, or a pattern that keeps escalating despite gentle routines. Persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner, whether medical or East Asian medical as suits the complaint. Hanyan offers most people a quiet acquaintance with their own temple landscape; the emergency department remains the right address for everything louder than that.
Hanyan waits just above the temple hairline, an early station on the Gallbladder channel’s long walk down the side of the body. Classical lists reach for it in one-sided headache, dizziness, and tinnitus. This guide walks through finding it by touch and pressing it gently at home.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Hanyan without knowing anything about cun?
- Use the temple corner and the ear tip as your whole map. Find the sharp turn of the frontal hairline at the temple corner, rise half a thumb-width, and you are at Touwei. Trace the hairline backward toward the region in front of the ear that sits level with the ear tip — that far end is Qubin. Divide the curve you traced into four equal parts and settle one quarter of the way back from Touwei, just above the hair. The cun arithmetic simply encodes that same landmark sequence proportionally.
- Is pressing Hanyan myself actually safe?
- Gentle fingertip pressure on the scalp surface is generally reasonable self-care for healthy adults: the finger meets skin, a thin muscle, and solid bone, with no deep structures anywhere near. Notably, the licensed dataset records no specific caution for this point at all. That absence is reassuring, not a licence — keep contact light and superficial, honour the stop signals of sharp or radiating sensation, and skip the area whenever the skin there is broken or recently injured.
- What did classical practice use Hanyan for?
- The traditional record lists one-sided headache, dizziness, tinnitus, toothache, facial paralysis, neck pain, and convulsions. Classical texts describe the Gallbladder channel zigzagging down the side of the head, which made the lateral hairline natural hunting ground for one-sided head complaints, and its crossing-point status tied the temple band to the face and ear below. Those are traditional frameworks for understanding the body, documented for context — not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why do so many headache points crowd the temple hairline?
- Because in classical geography that band is a corridor. Several channel courses that climb the side of the head pass over or near the temple hairline, which is exactly why the dataset files Hanyan among crossing-points — places where routes converge and share territory. A one-sided headache was traditionally read as disturbance along that lateral corridor, so practitioners lined the route with stations rather than picking a single spot. Modern map-lovers can appreciate the logic even while holding the physiology loosely.
- Can acupressure at Hanyan replace seeing a doctor about my headaches?
- No. Self-acupressure is a comfort practice, not a diagnostic tool. Headaches carrying red flags — sudden worst-ever onset, fever with stiff neck, recent head injury, weakness or vision or speech changes, or a steady escalation over weeks — need prompt professional assessment, full stop. Think of the two as different floors of one building: daily self-care lives downstairs, and clinical medicine keeps the consulting room upstairs that you visit when symptoms persist or frighten you. Neither substitutes for the other.
Sources
- 01WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region (2008), World Health Organization — nomenclature conventions.
- 02A Manual of Acupuncture, Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji and Kevin Baker — point-name tradition, crossing-point theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for GB4 Hanyan — location, point class, actions, and indication record.
Last reviewed
牌記This leaf, for machines
Old books ended with a colophon saying who printed them. Every leaf here carries the same facts as structured data for agents and search, with no layout in the way.
- GET /en/points/gb4/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/gb4/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/gb4/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "GB4",
"name": {
"en": "Hanyan",
"gloss": "Jaw Pressing",
"zh-Hant": "頷厭",
"zh-Hans": "颔厌"
},
"channel": {
"id": "GB",
"order": 4,
"of": 44
},
"location": {
"text": "In the hair of the temple, a quarter of the way along the hairline curve from the forehead corner to ear-top level."
},
"for": [
"one-sided headache",
"dizziness",
"ringing ears"
],
"press": {
"text": "Gentle fingertip pressure on the scalp, about a minute each side.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Tongren Shuxue Zhenjiu Tujing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/gb4",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}