陽溪 Yangxi
“Yang Ravine” · LI5
Hand Yangming · 5 of 20 · jing-river
Where. Lift the thumb: on the thumb side of the back of the wrist, in the hollow between the two tendons.
For. Wrist pain, headache, toothache.
Press. Fingertip pressure into the hollow, about a minute each wrist.
陽溪者，火也。一名中魁，在腕中上側兩傍間陷者按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Yangxi Sits at the Wrist
Turn your hand over and look at its back, and the map nearly draws itself. Where the wrist joins the hand runs a crease, and the dataset places Yangxi at the thumb-side end of that crease: in the depression that appears between the tendons of the extensor pollicis longus and the extensor pollicis brevis when the thumb tilts upward. The Latin names sound forbidding but describe the most familiar sight in daily movement — the two slender cords that stand up along the back of the wrist whenever you lift your thumb away from your fingers. Western anatomy noticed the same hollow long ago and nicknamed it the anatomical snuffbox; tradition and anatomy, arriving from opposite directions, meet at this one small dip.
The large intestine channel passes this way early in its journey. Classical texts describe the pathway setting out beside the index fingernail, crossing the web between thumb and forefinger, pausing at this wrist hollow, then climbing the forearm toward the elbow and onward, eventually finishing beside the nostril. Because the channel travels from hand to head, the tradition reads everything along that route as connected, and the wrist serves as a gateway station where the gathered flow picks up breadth. The Yangming pair of channels, to which the large intestine belongs, carries an old classical reputation for abundance — texts describe these pathways as richly supplied with qi and blood.
What lies under the fingertips deserves a gentle hand. The floor of the hollow is built from carpal bones, and close by pass a blood vessel and fine nerve twigs — grow quiet, and many people can feel a soft, rhythmic pulse drifting under the pad of a resting finger, the radial artery sending a branch past the site. None of this argues against touching the point; it argues for lightness. Location here is a matter of patient fingertips reading shallow contours, never of force.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit upright on a firm chair with both feet down and shoulders released. Rest the back of your left hand on your thigh, palm facing down, wrist loose. Raise your thumb slowly away from the fingers, the way you might hail a passing taxi, and watch the back of your wrist: two thin tendon ridges rise and separate, one running to the base of the thumb, the other toward the index side. With the pad of your right index finger, find the groove between those ridges and follow it down to the level of the back-of-wrist crease. The soft hollow you settle into there is Yangxi. Swap hands and repeat, giving the other wrist the same unhurried attention.
A few quiet confirmations help before any pressing begins. Touch feather-light and compare wrists: most people notice a faint, dull awareness at the true point and little sensation a finger-width away. If a gentle, even pulse reaches your fingertip, welcome it — the vessel that lives near this hollow is introducing itself, and the correct response is lighter pressure, not retreat. Take a few slow breaths and let the wrist soften; as the muscles release, the hollow usually opens a shade deeper and becomes easier to read.
Two classic misses account for most failed searches. The first is wandering deep into the webbing between thumb and index finger — a fertile point-finding neighborhood in its own right, but not this address; Yangxi stays at the wrist crease, not out in the web. The second is chasing the tendon cords up the forearm and losing the crease as a reference line. When in doubt, lower the thumb, look again at the crease, raise the thumb once more, and descend into the groove a single time, slowly.
Reading the Name: The Yang Ravine
The two characters sketch the site in miniature. Yang 陽 means the sunny side — traditional body-topography assigns the yang, sun-facing surfaces to the back of the body, so the back of the wrist qualifies twice over. Xi 溪 means a mountain stream or ravine, and point-naming custom reserves it for grooves that run between fleshy prominences, where qi and blood were imagined flowing like water between banks. Read together, Yangxi is the stream of the yang side: two tendon ridges standing as valley walls, the hollow between them a streambed through which the channel’s current runs.
The stream carries an official title as well. Classical teaching sorts selected points below the elbow and knee into five transport stations — well, spring, stream, river, and sea — using deepening water as the metaphor for qi gathering force as it moves from the fingertips inward. Yangxi holds the river office on the large intestine channel: the stage where the current, having gathered through the smaller stations, broadens and rushes. In the traditional five-phase tables, the river seats of the yang channels are paired with fire — a correspondence the classics recorded and later generations of practitioners kept in view when weighing one point of a channel against another.
Pinyin renders the name Yángxī, a rising second tone on yang and a high, level first tone on xi. The hanzi pair 陽溪 is short enough to memorise at a glance. Like many points named for landscape — gates, valleys, courtyards, seas — the metaphor does genuine work: it says the tradition treats this spot as living, moving water, a thoroughfare rather than a pool. The name is itself a small set of instructions about how to approach it.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded indications read: wrist pain, headache, red swollen eyes, deafness, toothache, and epilepsy. Wrist trouble heads the list for the plainest reason imaginable — the point lives on the wrist, and classical selection thinking summarised its method as reaching for what the pathway passes through. Headache follows from the map rather than from local anatomy: because the large intestine channel climbs from the hand toward the face, with classical texts describing its finish beside the nose, the whole head-and-face region belonged to this channel’s territory, and practitioners reached along it when head complaints presented.
The remaining entries wear their age openly. Red swollen eyes is a traditional umbrella for redness, puffiness, and burning discomfort around the eyes, understood in the classical frame as heat traveling upward along the channel toward the face. Toothache and deafness joined the same itinerary — cheek, jaw, ear, and eye all lie along the route the texts drew, so all became reachable through the channel’s points. Epilepsy appears in the historic record as the medicine of its era honestly cataloguing the conditions it engaged; anyone with seizure-related concerns today belongs in the care of physicians, and nothing on this page pretends otherwise.
It bears repeating plainly: these are the traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset and classical literature, offered for cultural and historical understanding. They are not claims that pressing this point treats disease, and nothing here replaces assessment by a qualified clinician. Where modern research touches self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, and evidence gathered around any single point remains thin. Hold the tradition lightly, and hold the safety rules firmly.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the hollow found by the walkthrough above, settle in: seated, the back of the hand resting on your thigh or a table, wrist unforced. Place the pad of your index or middle finger — never the tip — on the spot. Begin with simple contact for a few breaths, then add small, slow circles, letting the skin glide over the tissue beneath rather than grinding down onto the bones. Pressure should register as pleasant dullness or mild warmth, never sharpness. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, matched where possible to slow exhales so each circle rides the breath out. Swap hands and repeat, keeping the sessions symmetrical.
Quality matters more than duration. Light, patient, regularly repeated contact fits the wellness register this page practises; hard jabbing causes harm and teaches the body nothing. Warm cold hands first, because chilled muscle guards. Choose a quiet corner over a screen, since the practice doubles as a pause: inhale through the nose, notice the stillness or the faint pulse under your fingertip, press gently on the long exhale. People who keep a routine often anchor it to an existing habit — morning coffee, an afternoon stretch — because consistency, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask for.
Treat the exercise as a small ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Notice what changes across weeks: perhaps the wrist feels less guarded when it turns, perhaps warmth spreads while you press, perhaps nothing shifts except that you spend ninety seconds 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. When curiosity pulls that way, return to gentleness or simply stop for the day.
Cautions and Safe Practice
The licensed dataset records no specific caution entry for this point, and this page responds by fencing conservatively anyway, because the local anatomy supplies ample reasons. Beneath the hollow sit carpal bones; alongside them travel a blood vessel and fine nerve branches; the very pulse many seekers feel is the proof. Home self-care therefore means purely surface contact — skin and superficial tissue, nothing driven inward — and a standing rule that any increase in sensation is a signal to lighten, not to push.
The practical rules follow plainly. Use finger pads only — no elbows, knuckles, or tools. Skip the point entirely over broken, irritated, or diseased skin. Give a freshly sprained wrist a wide berth until healing is underway, and wait for a clinician’s clearance after any wrist fracture or wrist surgery before adding pressure work. One sign deserves special respect: lasting tenderness in this exact hollow after a fall onto the hand warrants prompt professional assessment, because the small, boat-shaped wrist bone forming the floor of the snuffbox is one clinicians examine carefully after such injuries, and early evaluation is always the prudent course. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stop at once and do not try again that day. Pregnant readers should consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice.
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 sudden severe headache, headache with fever, stiff neck, vision change, or weakness; for hearing changes that persist or affect one side; for red painful eyes or any disturbance of vision; for facial or dental swelling with fever; and for wrist pain accompanied by numbness or weakness or refusing to settle after weeks. Persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner, physician or East Asian medicine provider as suits the complaint. The ravine imagery is charming, but the safest gift Yangxi offers most people is a kinder acquaintance with their own wrist.
At the thumb-side end of the wrist’s back crease, tucked between two taut tendon cords, lies Yangxi — the Yang Ravine. Classical practice honoured this small hollow as the large intestine channel’s river point, reaching for it when the wrist ached or the head throbbed. This guide walks you through finding it by touch and pressing it gently, safely, and within honest limits.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Yangxi without knowing anything about cun?
- Use your own thumb as the whole map. Lay the back of the hand flat, raise the thumb slowly, and watch two tendon cords stand up at the base of the wrist. Settle a fingertip into the hollow between those cords at the level of the back-of-wrist crease — that is the spot the dataset describes. Proportional measurements simply encode the same sequence of visible landmarks in traditional language; your body already carries every coordinate needed.
- Is pressing Yangxi myself actually safe?
- For healthy adults, gentle fingertip pressure held on the surface is generally reasonable self-care, because it engages skin and superficial tissue far short of the bone, vessel, and nerve structures beneath. What keeps it reasonable are the repeated house rules: finger pads only, light pressure, no tools, nothing over broken skin, and immediate stopping at any sharp or radiating sensation. A soft pulse felt under the pad is a cue for lightness, not an error message.
- What did classical practice use Yangxi for?
- The traditional record lists wrist pain, headache, red swollen eyes, deafness, toothache, and epilepsy. Classical texts describe it as the river station of the large intestine channel, which is why complaints along the channel’s hand-to-face route dominate its historic portfolio. Those are traditional frameworks for understanding the body, documented for context — not evidence-backed treatment claims — and several of the listed conditions clearly belong with modern professionals today.
- Why is it called a river point — what does jing-river mean?
- Classical theory pictures qi moving up the limb the way water gathers downhill: emerging at a well, trickling at a spring, collecting at a stream, broadening at a river, and joining the sea at stations nearer the elbow. Yangxi fills the river role on the large intestine channel — the image of a current grown strong and wide. It is a classical sorting scheme that helped generations organise their craft, not a modern statement about outcomes.
- Can acupressure replace care for wrist pain?
- No. Wrist pain that persists for weeks, follows an injury, or arrives with numbness, tingling, or weakness needs professional assessment promptly — and tenderness in this hollow after a fall deserves it especially. Think of the two as different roles on one team: daily self-care is the maintenance crew that keeps ordinary wear comfortable, and clinical medicine is the engineering department you call when something breaks or will not settle. 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, five-transport theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for LI5 Yangxi — location, point class, actions, and the empty 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/li5/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/li5/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/li5/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "LI5",
"name": {
"en": "Yangxi",
"gloss": "Yang Ravine",
"zh-Hant": "陽溪",
"zh-Hans": "阳溪"
},
"channel": {
"id": "LI",
"order": 5,
"of": 20
},
"location": {
"text": "Lift the thumb: on the thumb side of the back of the wrist, in the hollow between the two tendons."
},
"for": [
"wrist pain",
"headache",
"toothache"
],
"press": {
"text": "Fingertip pressure into the hollow, about a minute each wrist.",
"seconds": 60
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/li5",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}