復溜 Fuliu
“Returning Flow” · KI7
Foot Shaoyin · 7 of 27 · jing-river
Where. Three finger-widths above the hollow behind the inner ankle, just in front of the Achilles tendon.
For. Night sweats; swelling; bloating.
Press. Light fingertip pressure in front of the tendon, about a minute each leg.
複溜者，金也。一名伏白，一名昌陽，在足內踝上二寸陷者中按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Fuliu Sits on the Inner Lower Leg
Fuliu belongs to the inner line of the lower leg. The dataset places it on the medial aspect of the lower leg, two cun directly above Taixi (KI3), anterior to the Achilles tendon. Two landmarks do all the locating work: Taixi itself, which sits in the depression between the tip of the medial malleolus — the inner ankle bone — and the Achilles tendon, and the taut tendon cord rising from the heel. Walk straight up from that ankle hollow the length of two of your own thumb-widths and you arrive at ground where the tendon still borders you; the soft strip just ahead of the cord is Fuliu’s address. A cun, as ever in this system, is a proportional measure taken from the body being examined, not a fixed ruler distance.
The neighbourhood clarifies the position further. The neighbouring entry records Jiaoxin (KI8) half a cun in front of Fuliu and behind the medial border of the tibia, which places Fuliu on the strip of ground between the back edge of the shinbone and the tendon cord — roughly midway, hugging neither. Under the skin here is the lower calf, where the belly of the calf muscle narrows and hands its work over to the tendon. No lung, no abdomen, no eye lies beneath this spot; the landscape is muscle fibre, tendon edge, and the shallow layer of vessels and fascia. That is why classical location texts describe the area calmly, and why self-palpation here carries few of the structural worries that make certain other locations delicate.
Channel context rounds out the picture. Classical teaching draws the kidney channel beginning on the sole of the foot and ascending along the inner leg toward the chest, and the recorded sequence of points climbs exactly that way: from the sole to the ankle hollow, then up the medial shin. Fuliu stands early on that ascent — the seventh station on a twenty-seven-point journey. Knowing the direction steadies the searching hand: this stretch of points forms a vertical line along the inner leg, not a scattered field, and the upward course is why the old books treat this whole span of shin as one continuous neighbourhood of related stations.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit on a chair with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee so the whole inner leg faces you, muscles slack. Find first the inner ankle bone and trace your fingertip backward to the thick cord of the Achilles tendon; the hollow between them marks Taixi (KI3). From that hollow, measure straight up the leg two thumb-widths — the width of your own thumb at the knuckle, applied edge to edge twice. Your fingertip should now rest on the medial side of the lower leg, on soft tissue sitting just in front of the tendon cord. Press lightly: a comfortable, dull awareness answers at the true spot and fades within a finger-width in any direction.
Two checks make the placement certain. First, flex the foot gently by drawing the toes toward the shin: the tendon cord stands out sharply, and you can confirm your fingertip sits clearly ahead of it rather than on top of it — pressure belongs on the muscle side, never grinding on the cord itself. Second, compare sides. Locate the mirror spot on the other leg; healthy bodies answer symmetrically, and any marked difference usually signals that one search drifted. If the pad finds bare bone, you have wandered forward toward the shinbone’s edge; if it rolls over something hard and rounded, you have wandered back onto the tendon. Slide to the middle of the soft strip and try again.
The classic mistakes are few and easily corrected. Walking up three or four thumb-widths instead of two lands you higher on the shin among neighbours; falling short leaves you at the ankle hollow itself. Drifting forward brings the ridge of the shinbone under the pad; drifting backward seats you on the tendon. When lost, return to the starting hollow behind the ankle bone and recount slowly — one width, then the second. Ten patient seconds rebuild the whole map. Once both legs have been located, remember the route rather than the coordinates: landmark sequences survive tired evenings far better than memorised measurements.
Reading the Name: Returning Flow
The characters carry the point’s whole temperament. Fu 復 means to return, to go back, to do again — recovery and repetition live inside it. Liu 溜 pictures water slipping and gliding onward; commentators have long connected it with the homophonous character for a flowing stream, and dictionaries record the two senses living side by side. Joined, Fuliu reads most simply as returning flow, or flow restored. For a station on the channel traditional medicine charges with governing water, the image could hardly fit better: this is where the current, having travelled, turns and comes home. Name glosses are interpretation rather than prescription, but the water vocabulary is unmistakably this point’s native tongue.
Its category deepens the picture. The five shu points of every channel were classically imagined as a river’s biography — a bubbling well at toe or fingertip, a widening spring, a stream, then a broad river, finally a sea where waters gather near elbow or knee. Fuliu holds the jing-river office on the kidney channel: the stage where the current runs wide, deep, and steady. Classical five-phase teaching adds one more layer, assigning this point the phase metal within a water channel; since metal generates water in that system, commentators have read it as the channel’s supportive mother point. These are traditional frameworks for organising a channel — elegant bookkeeping from an older anatomy, presented here as heritage rather than mechanism.
Pinyin writes the name Fuliu: fu spoken on a falling fourth tone, liu on a high, flat first tone — checked character by character against dictionary entries for the point. The hanzi pair 復溜 is compact enough to take in at a glance, and it joins a large family of water-named stations: springs, valleys, streams, ravines, and seas scattered across the classical maps. The naming habit is not decoration. It encodes how the tradition felt about a place — fast or slow, gathering or dispersing, rising or returning. Read enough names and the channels become a landscape you can narrate, with Fuliu simply the bend in the river where the water turns around.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded indications read: edema, abdominal distension, night sweats, fever without sweating, borborygmus, diarrhea, weakness of the legs, and stiffness and pain of the spine. Framed as tradition rather than promise, nearly all of these belong to a single theme — water and its movements. Edema, in the classical frame, is fluid pooling where it should be circulating; abdominal distension is the related sense of heaviness and fullness through the middle of the trunk; borborygmus, the honest old word for gurgling intestines, and diarrhea carry the same story downward and out. When the body’s waters seemed stalled, reversed, or unruly, classical practice traditionally reached for this point, and its flowing name kept it near the head of such discussions.
The sweat pair rewards attention. One record lists night sweats — moisture arriving unbidden during sleep — and, alongside it, fever without sweating, where heat rises but no moisture breaks. Opposites on their face, they sit together because traditional teaching treated Fuliu as a regulator of fluids in either direction: encouraging outward movement where sweat would not come, and settling overflow where it arrived at the wrong hours. Whatever one makes of the physiology, the pairing documents how coherently the old framework thought of this point as a valve on the waterways. It is a window into classical reasoning, recorded here for understanding — not a claim about what pressing the point achieves.
The last two indications step away from the water theme. Weakness of the legs follows plainly from geography: the channel runs the length of the inner limb, and lower-leg stations were traditionally consulted for the limb they inhabit. Stiffness and pain of the spine reaches further back — classical teaching described the loins and lower back as home territory of the kidney system, so lumbar and spinal complaints were long discussed alongside kidney-channel points. As always, these are the traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset and classical literature, offered for cultural and historical understanding. Where modern research touches self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, and evidence specific to any single point remains thin.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With both points located, settle in: seated, the leg supported, foot relaxed, trouser legs rolled clear. Rest the pads of your index and middle fingers on the spot — pads, never tips or knuckles — and begin with plain warm contact for a few slow breaths. Then add small, unhurried circles, letting the skin glide over the tissue beneath instead of dragging across it. Pressure should register as pleasant dullness or mild warmth spreading gently outward — never sharpness, and never force aimed onto the tendon cord beside the point. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily; matching the circles to long exhales turns the minute into a small breathing pause as much as a physical one.
Quality outranks duration by a wide margin. Light, patient, regularly repeated contact fits the wellness register this page practises; hard digging teaches the body nothing and risks a bruise where tendon edge and shallow vessels run close together. On cold evenings warm your hands first, because chilled muscle guards. Evening hours suit many people — the day is done and the legs are finally off duty — and readers drawn to this point’s nightly associations often fold a minute of quiet pressing into an existing wind-down habit: after the dishes, before the lamp goes low. Whatever anchor you choose, keep the sessions symmetrical: each leg receives the same minute, the same gentleness, the same attention.
Hold the practice as a ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Across a few weeks you may notice that the area feels less tender under touch, that the legs feel less heavy by evening, or simply that you spent two minutes a day genuinely attending to your own body — every outcome inside the honest scope of self-acupressure. What falls outside it is escalation: pressing harder, longer, or deeper to compel a result, or continuing through discomfort in the hope that intensity will substitute for patience. Curiosity pulls that way sometimes; answer it with lighter pressure or an early finish. The point has waited centuries and does not mind waiting until tomorrow.
Cautions and Safe Practice
Unlike points high on the chest wall or at the throat, Fuliu arrives with an empty caution shelf: the licensed dataset records no contraindications for it. Geography explains the calm. The point sits on the medial calf over muscle, fascia, and the front edge of the Achilles tendon — far from lungs, eyes, and the major abdominal organs, far from every structure that makes certain locations delicate. Professional practice works here routinely, and home fingertip pressure engages only the most superficial layers. An empty record remains a fact about the record, though, not an invitation to force. The ordinary manners apply everywhere, plus one local courtesy worth naming: the tendon cord itself prefers to be skirted rather than pressed.
Those manners are quickly listed. Use finger pads only, and keep pressure at the level of pleasant dullness. Skip the spot over cuts, rashes, or broken skin, over prominent or varicose veins, and over any lump, swelling, or recent injury you cannot account for. Sharp, electric, or numbing sensation means stop at once and leave the point alone for the day. Pregnant readers, and anyone with a diagnosed condition affecting the legs — circulation problems, diabetes with reduced sensation, recent surgery, or a history of blood clots — do best to consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice. None of this is special to Fuliu; it is simply what respectful self-care looks like everywhere.
And above the specifics stands the universal rule: this page is educational, acupressure is self-care, and neither diagnoses nor treats anything. Because the traditional indications include swelling and bowel complaints, say the boundaries concretely. Persistent or one-sided leg swelling, swelling accompanied by breathlessness or chest pain, diarrhea lasting beyond a couple of days or carrying blood or fever, and night sweats that regularly soak bedding for weeks all belong with a licensed clinician promptly — not with longer pressing sessions. Persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner, of whichever tradition suits the complaint. May the little routine beside the ankle remain the quiet companion of good care, never its substitute.
Fuliu, Returning Flow, rests on the inner calf, two thumb-widths above the hollow behind the inner ankle bone, just ahead of the Achilles tendon. Classical practice reached for it whenever water seemed misbehaving — swelling, bloating, sweats that arrived at night or refused to come with fever. This guide walks through finding it by touch, reading its watery name, and pressing it gently at home.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Fuliu without knowing anything about cun?
- Use the ankle hollow as the whole map. Cross one ankle over the opposite knee, find the hollow between the tip of the inner ankle bone and the Achilles tendon — that hollow is Taixi — then walk two of your own thumb-widths straight up the inner leg. The soft strip that answers with a dull, spreading awareness, just ahead of the tendon cord, is the location the dataset describes. Cun measurements simply encode that same landmark walk in proportional language.
- Is pressing Fuliu myself actually safe?
- Gentle fingertip pressure held on the surface is reasonable self-care for healthy adults, and the licensed dataset records no specific cautions for this point. The surroundings are forgiving — muscle and fascia in front of a tendon, far from delicate structures — provided you stay off the tendon cord itself and respect the ordinary stop signals: sharp pain, radiating or numbing sensation, or any worsening discomfort all mean finish immediately and try again another day.
- What did classical practice use Fuliu for?
- The traditional record lists edema, abdominal distension, night sweats, fever without sweating, gurgling intestines, diarrhea, weakness of the legs, and stiffness and pain of the spine. Classical texts describe it as the jing-river point of the kidney channel — the stretch where the channel’s current runs broadest — which is why fluid-themed complaints dominate its historic portfolio. Those are traditional frameworks for understanding the body, documented for context, not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why is a point named Returning Flow linked with sweating problems?
- Because the old framework saw one water system behind both directions of trouble. Sweat was understood as fluid reaching the body’s surface; night sweats meant it escaping at the wrong hours, and fever without sweating meant it failing to arrive at all. A point named for flow turning right again became the natural candidate for steering matters either way. The logic is internally coherent heritage — a way the tradition organised its observations — rather than modern physiology, and this page presents it strictly as such.
- Can acupressure at Fuliu replace seeing a doctor about my swollen ankles?
- No. Self-acupressure is a comfort practice, not a diagnostic tool, and leg swelling carries real red flags — one-sided swelling, swelling after long travel or surgery, swelling with breathlessness, or swelling that persists for weeks — needing prompt professional assessment. Picture the two as different floors of the same building: daily self-care lives downstairs, and clinical medicine keeps the consulting room upstairs. Neither substitutes for the other, and the downstairs tenant never pretends otherwise.
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, five-shu theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for KI7 Fuliu — 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/ki7/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/ki7/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/ki7/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "KI7",
"name": {
"en": "Fuliu",
"gloss": "Returning Flow",
"zh-Hant": "復溜",
"zh-Hans": "复溜"
},
"channel": {
"id": "KI",
"order": 7,
"of": 27
},
"location": {
"text": "Three finger-widths above the hollow behind the inner ankle, just in front of the Achilles tendon."
},
"for": [
"night sweats",
"swelling",
"bloating"
],
"press": {
"text": "Light fingertip pressure in front of the tendon, about a minute each leg.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/ki7",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}