太谿 Taixi
“Great Stream” · KI3
Foot Shaoyin · 3 of 27 · shu-stream, yuan-source
Where. In the hollow between the inner ankle bone and the Achilles tendon.
For. Ringing ears; low-back ache; poor sleep.
Press. Gentle finger pressure in the hollow, about a minute each side.
太溪者，土也。在足內踝後跟骨上動脈陷者中按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
配 · Pairs with
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Taixi Sits at the Inner Ankle
The dataset places Taixi on the medial side of the foot — the side of the big toe — posterior to the medial malleolus, in the depression between the tip of the medial malleolus and the Achilles tendon. Unpacked landmark by landmark: the medial malleolus is the rounded knob on the inner side of the ankle, the bony prominence formed at the lower end of the shin bone, and its tip is simply the point of that knob. The Achilles tendon is the stout cord you can trace with a finger from the calf down to the heel. Rest one edge of a fingertip against the back of the ankle knob, another against the front of the cord, and the soft hollow between them is the recorded site. Notably, this location names no cun measurements at all: two landmarks carry the whole description.
What surrounds the fingertips deserves respect rather than force. The hollow sits beside two hard structures and among working tendons, and blood vessels travel close to the surface behind the inner ankle — many people feel a gentle pulse in this neighborhood when a fingertip rests there lightly. That pulse is a signpost for location and an instruction for technique at once: everything about this spot asks for feather-light exploration. Compared with the thin-walled chest, the geography here is sturdy — skin and yielding tissue over the dense architecture of the ankle — but sturdiness is an invitation to patience, not to pressure. The tradition that named this place a great stream imagined moving water, never a lever.
A glance at the neighbours shows why this hollow works as the surveyor’s benchmark of the whole district. Downhill, the catalogue sets Shuiquan (KI5) one cun directly below Taixi, in the depression on the inner side of the heel-bone prominence; uphill on the lower leg, Fuliu (KI7) waits two cun above Taixi, on the front side of the Achilles tendon. Behind and below the ankle knob sits Dazhong (KI4), tucked near where the tendon fastens toward the heel, while Zhaohai (KI6) occupies the hollow directly below the tip of the medial malleolus. Nearly every neighbouring address is written relative to this point or to the same two landmarks. The channel itself gives the district its meaning: classical descriptions draw the kidney pathway beginning on the sole of the foot, passing this hollow, then climbing the inner leg toward the chest.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit upright on a firm chair and rest your left ankle across your right knee — or park the heel on a low stool — letting the whole foot hang loose and the toes stay unclenched. With your right hand, walk your fingertips down the inner edge of the shin until they meet the rounded knob of the inner ankle, and glide outward to its most prominent tip. Next find the stout cord standing behind it: rock the foot gently and watch the Achilles tendon rise taut, then relax and let it soften again. Now set the pad of your index or middle finger into the gap between the back of the knob and the front of the cord, letting the finger sink only until the skin yields into the soft hollow there. Repeat the whole search on the other ankle so both sides receive the same unhurried attention.
A few quiet confirmations help before any pressing begins. Touch feather-light and compare sides: most people notice a faint, dull, spreading awareness at the true hollow and little sensation a finger-width away, and the two ankles often differ slightly. Try a passive test too — slowly rock the foot back and forth and feel the hollow shift a little as the tendons glide past the fingertip. A soft pulse felt nearby is normal and welcome; it simply repeats the earlier advice to keep everything light. If the area seems silent everywhere, reseat the fingertip a few millimetres in any direction and search again: the point is a small zone rather than a pinhead, and patient wandering finds it faster than force ever could.
The usual slips are easy to name. Drifting forward onto the face of the bone lands on bare, uninformative knob — and directly below the tip lies Zhaohai’s own separate hollow, a different address entirely. Sliding backward onto the tendon itself meets taut cord rather than the soft gap, and continuing toward the heel approaches Dazhong’s territory near the tendon’s attachment. Wandering up the shin leaves the foot altogether and enters Fuliu’s corridor two cun higher. Whenever the search loses its way, return to the opening landmarks — the tip of the knob, the front of the cord — and measure between them one slow time.
Reading the Name: Great Stream
Two characters sketch the landscape. Tai 太 means great in the fullest degree — grand, supreme, the superlative marker of classical Chinese. Xi 溪 means a mountain stream: water threading its way through a ravine. Set together, Taixi reads as the Great Stream, and the geography supplies the picture. The kidney channel belongs to water among the five elements, its flow likened in classical imagery to a river rising; at this hollow, tucked behind the inner ankle, the tradition understood that water to gather at its deepest and fullest before the long climb up the leg. A ravine widens, a current slows and deepens, and what was a thread becomes a stream worth naming.
The name also marks a double office. The dataset records two categories for this point. First, it is the shu-stream point — the third stage in the classical five-part sequence that pictures a channel’s flow as well-water rising through spring, stream, river, and sea, each stage a little broader than the last; the shu-stream is where the current has gathered width and weight. Second, it is the yuan-source point — the place where a channel’s qi is understood to pool nearest the surface, something like the residence where a household keeps its seal. Holding both posts on the channel that classical teaching treats as the root of the body’s foundational reserve makes this hollow unusually weighty in traditional discussion: not a way-station but a door to the store-room.
Pinyin writes the name Tàixī: tai carries the fourth tone, a firm fall like a decision made and closed; xi carries the first tone, high and level, held steadily without wavering. The hanzi pair 太溪 is compact enough to memorise at a glance, and the image repays attention each time a fingertip settles into the hollow: you are visiting a gathering of waters. Names in this tradition rarely decorate — they compress location, function, and an old way of thinking about the body into two syllables. This one adds a quiet etiquette: arrive at a wellspring the way you would at a stream in the mountains, softly and without hurry.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded indications read: headache, dizziness, sore and swollen throat, toothache, deafness, tinnitus, irregular menstruation, nocturnal emission, impotence, frequent urination, lumbosacral pain, cold lower limbs, asthma, chest pain, coughing blood, insomnia, and poor memory. Read as a group rather than a pharmacy list, four territories emerge: the head and sense organs; the lower burner and lower back; the chest and breath; and the quieter country of sleep and memory. A single hollow at the ankle collecting so wide a portfolio puzzles modern eyes until the classical frame reappears: this is the channel’s yuan-source point, the place where the kidney system’s activity was thought to stand closest to the surface, so discussions of the whole system naturally passed through here.
The upper territories have their traditional logic. Classical teaching holds that the kidney stores essence — the deep, inherited reserve of the body — and that essence gives rise to marrow, which fills the spine and brain; insomnia and poor memory therefore entered discussions of kidney points through that essence-marrow frame. The same teaching describes the ears as the opening of the kidney system, which is how deafness and tinnitus came to sit on the list of a point located nowhere near an ear. The sore and swollen throat entry reads two ways in the old literature: one picture has kidney water rising to keep the throat moist, and classical channel accounts further describe the pathway continuing through the trunk — passing through the lung — and rising along the throat to the root of the tongue. Headache, dizziness, and toothache belong to the same upward story: the upper reaches of a channel whose roots were thought to drink from this stream.
The lower territories follow their own threads of the same framework. Essence was tied in classical thought to reproductive vitality, and the kidney was said to govern water, which brings irregular menstruation, nocturnal emission, impotence, and frequent urination under the kidney banner; classical teaching called the lower back the residence of the kidney, giving lumbosacral pain its seat here, while cold lower limbs reflected a warming reserve run thin. Breath, too, had its place: classical texts describe the kidney as anchoring respiration, receiving qi and holding it down, which is how asthma, chest pain, and coughing blood appear on a foot-and-ankle point. It bears repeating plainly: these are traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset, offered for cultural and historical understanding — not claims that pressing this point treats disease, and several listed items, coughing blood and chest pain chief among them, belong promptly with medical professionals today. Where modern research touches self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the hollow found by the walkthrough above, settle in: seated, ankle resting across the opposite knee or heel on a stool, foot heavy and relaxed. Place the pads of two fingers — never the tips or nails — on the hollow and begin with contact alone for a few slow breaths. Then add small, unhurried circles, letting the skin glide over the tissue beneath, or hold a steady, patient stillness. Pressure should register as a pleasant, dull, spreading warmth, never sharpness. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, with the exhale doing the work: ease in gently as the breath leaves, soften again on the inhale. Swap ankles and treat both alike, keeping the sessions symmetrical.
Quality outranks duration here, as everywhere in home practice. Warm your hands first — chilled fingers make the tissue guard — and keep nails trimmed so the pad, not the edge, meets the skin. No tools belong in this work: rollers, sticks, and pointed devices concentrate force in ways fingertips were never meant to, and the recorded tradition assumes human touch. People who keep the habit usually anchor it to something already in the day — the evening foot-wash, the lamp turned low before sleep, tea steeping — because regularity, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask for. Two quiet minutes daily beat twenty bruising minutes monthly.
Treat the session as a small ceremony of attention rather than a repair job. Notice what changes across weeks: perhaps the hollow feels less guarded, perhaps the minutes of pressing become the calmest of the evening, perhaps nothing shifts except that you spent them attending to your own body. Every one of those outcomes fits the honest scope of self-acupressure. What does not fit is escalation — pressing harder, longer, or deeper to force a result, or continuing through pain hoping persistence converts into benefit. When curiosity pulls that way, return to gentleness, or set the practice down for the day; the stream will still be there tomorrow.
Cautions and Safe Practice
An honest starting point: the licensed dataset attaches no point-specific caution to this entry, which is why the echoed caution block above stands empty. That absence of a recorded warning is not permission to push harder — it is simply the dataset speaking narrowly, about professional technique at this one site, while the universal rules continue to govern every point on the body. Self-care here means gentle, purely surface contact: intention held in skin and superficial tissue, never driven inward; pleasant dullness welcomed, sharpness never; curiosity about deeper layers declined. The stream imagery earns its keep one last time — water shapes stone by arriving softly, over and over, never by striking.
Several moments call for pausing altogether. Skip the point while the skin of the foot or ankle is cut, abraded, peeling, or inflamed — athlete’s foot commonly irritates exactly this district — and until such skin has settled. Pause after any recent ankle sprain, fracture, or surgery until ordinary movement is cleared by whoever is treating you, and ask a clinician first if the ankle is visibly swollen, since puffiness changes what pressure means. Pause during feverish illness. Pregnant readers do well to consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice, even where a dataset records no caution. During any session, sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stop at once and do not try again that day; an ache that lingers afterward means the pressure exceeded what the tissue welcomed.
And the wider rule stands over everything: this page is educational, and acupressure is self-care, not diagnosis or therapy. Seek prompt medical care — not a longer pressing session — for chest pain or tightness, coughing blood, sudden or one-sided hearing loss, a severe or unprecedented headache or dizzy spell, urinary symptoms with fever or pain, or a sudden severe change in menstrual bleeding; those are alarms, not indications. For anything less dramatic that persists beyond a couple of weeks, a licensed practitioner — medical or East Asian medical, as suits the complaint — is the right next step. The Great Stream rewards visitors who arrive quietly; let that be the whole technique.
Taixi, the Great Stream, rests in the soft hollow between the inner ankle bone and the Achilles tendon — the place where the kidney channel’s qi is classically said to pool closest to the surface. Tradition reached for it in headache, dizziness, sore and swollen throat, and complaints of the ears. This guide walks through finding it by touch and pressing it gently.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Taixi without knowing anything about cun?
- Good news: this location never uses them. Find the rounded knob on the inner side of your ankle and glide to its tip; find the stout cord running from calf to heel; settle a fingertip in the soft hollow between the two. Two landmarks and one hollow are the entire address. Proportional measuring matters elsewhere on the body, but here the landmarks scale with you automatically — a child’s ankle and an adult’s offer the same negotiation between knob and cord.
- Is pressing Taixi myself actually safe?
- For healthy adults, gentle fingertip pressure held at the surface is generally reasonable self-care: the hollow is padded tissue over solid ankle architecture, far from lungs and organs, and the licensed dataset records no caution specific to this point. Safety still depends on manner. Use finger pads only, keep pressure at pleasant-dull intensity, decline anything sharp or electric, and skip the point over broken skin, on a freshly injured or visibly swollen ankle, or during feverish illness.
- Why would an ankle-area point matter for ears and throat?
- Through traditional reasoning rather than anatomy-classroom connections. Classical teaching described the ears as the opening of the kidney system, pictured kidney water rising to moisten the throat, and traced the channel’s course through the lung and up alongside the throat — and as the channel’s yuan-source point, Taixi stood in those discussions as the system’s nearest door. These frames are documented here for cultural understanding; they are not evidence-based treatment claims, and persistent ear or throat symptoms belong with a clinician.
- What makes Taixi special among the points around the inner ankle?
- It holds two classical titles at once: shu-stream point, the stage where the channel’s imagined current gathers breadth, and yuan-source point, the residence where a channel’s qi pools nearest the surface. It also anchors the local map — Shuiquan (KI5) sits one cun directly below it and Fuliu (KI7) two cun above it on the front of the tendon — so several neighbours carry its name in their addresses. On the channel that tradition treats as the body’s deep reserve, that combination made it a natural first reference.
- Can acupressure at Taixi replace seeing someone about headaches or restless nights?
- No. Self-acupressure is comfort practice, not diagnosis. A headache that arrives suddenly and severely, dizziness with unsteadiness or slurred speech, hearing that drops away suddenly, or sleeplessness that drags on and erodes daily life each deserve prompt professional assessment — pressing longer cannot substitute for being examined. Think of daily self-care and clinical care as different floors of one building: the quiet routine lives downstairs, and the consulting rooms upstairs open exactly when symptoms persist, escalate, or frighten you.
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, shu-stream and yuan-source theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for KI3 Taixi — location, point class, actions, and caution 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/ki3/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/ki3/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/ki3/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "KI3",
"name": {
"en": "Taixi",
"gloss": "Great Stream",
"zh-Hant": "太谿",
"zh-Hans": "太溪"
},
"channel": {
"id": "KI",
"order": 3,
"of": 27
},
"location": {
"text": "In the hollow between the inner ankle bone and the Achilles tendon."
},
"for": [
"ringing ears",
"low-back ache",
"poor sleep"
],
"press": {
"text": "Gentle finger pressure in the hollow, about a minute each side.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/ki3",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}