陽谷 Yanggu
“Yang Valley” · SI5
Hand Taiyang · 5 of 19 · jing-river
Where. On the outer wrist, little-finger side, in the dip between the knob of the forearm bone and the wrist bone.
For. Outer wrist and arm pain, ringing ears, toothache.
Press. Two finger pads, slow circles, one minute each wrist.
陽谷者，火也。在手外側腕中，兌骨下陷者中按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Yanggu Sits at the Wrist
The dataset locates Yanggu in one unhurried sentence: on the ulnar side of the wrist, in the depression between the styloid process of the ulna and the triquetral bone. Unpacked piece by piece, the address reads plainly. Ulnar means the little-finger side, named for the ulna — the forearm bone that runs along that edge. Its styloid process is the modest bony prominence felt at the wrist end of the forearm, the knuckle-like point many people rub absently when the wrist tires. The triquetral, meanwhile, is one of the small carpal bones of the hand, its name Latin for three-cornered, and it sits just beyond the styloid, toward the fingers. Between these two firm neighbours lies a soft dip, and that dip is the destination. Notice what the record does not contain: any measurement in cun. Here no proportional arithmetic is required — two named bones and the hollow between them carry the whole address.
The channel passing through gives the spot its importance. Classical texts describe the small intestine pathway setting out beside the little fingernail, running up the hand’s little-finger border, pausing at this wrist hollow, then climbing past the elbow and the shoulder to arrive finally at the cheek and the face. Yanggu stands as the fifth of those nineteen stations, and the wrist is where the current gathers breadth for the long ascent — which is why the tradition granted this hollow one of its senior titles, discussed below. A quiet piece of company completes the picture: the heart channel ends on this same finger, at the corner facing the ring finger, while the small intestine channel claims the outer edge. Two currents sharing one narrow finger, each keeping faithfully to its own side.
The neighbourhood rewards gentleness and repays study. Bone lies close beneath the skin here — the hollow is floored by carpal surfaces that a fingertip reads directly, with no thick muscle padding to interpret — while alongside run the slender structures that make the wrist work: tendons gliding to the fingers, and fine vessels and nerves threading this corner on their own errands. None of this argues against touching the point; it argues for lightness. Two neighbours on the same channel help confirm the address. Beyond the hollow, toward the palm, waits Wangu (SI4), tucked between the base of the fifth metacarpal and a neighbouring carpal bone — the channel’s gathering source point. Up the rim, toward the elbow, hides Yanglao (SI6), whose bony gap famously opens when you turn the palm toward the chest — the very manoeuvre that also brings Yanggu’s own landmarks into clearer view.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit upright on a firm chair with both feet down and shoulders released, and rest the forearm of the hand to be examined on a table, palm turned inward toward the chest so that the little-finger rim of the wrist faces you. Begin with the forearm-side landmark: walk your opposite fingertips down the outside edge of the forearm, on its little-finger side, until you meet the small, definite bump at the wrist end of the bone — the ulna’s styloid process. Now slide the fingertip a little further along, toward the hand and away from the elbow, into the soft dip that follows. The rounded mound you encounter at the far side of the dip is the triquetral. Resting between bump and mound, you have arrived. Swap hands and give the other wrist the same unhurried search.
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 hollow and little sensation a finger-width away. Take a few slow breaths and let the hand soften; then tilt it gently toward the thumb and release it back, watching the two bony neighbours travel together while the dip between them keeps its place. An everyday anchor corroborates the height of the site: the hollow sits about where the edge of a watch strap would cross the little-finger side of the wrist. If what you feel instead is taut cord — a tendon standing under the skin — slide slightly toward the back of the wrist and search again, since the hollow shelters beside the tendon’s line rather than beneath it.
Three classic misses account for most failed searches. The first is straying onto the back of the hand and groping among the knuckle roots — fertile point country in general, but not this address; Yanggu stays at the wrist line, not out among the metacarpals. The second is chasing the forearm upward, where muscle bellies swell and every hollow feels plausible; the styloid bump anchors the truth, and anything above it belongs to the forearm. The third is pressing hard, which flattens shallow contours everywhere; lightness is what lets a dip declare itself. When in doubt, return to the bump at the wrist end of the forearm bone, slide toward the hand once more, and settle slowly. Precision costs nothing here, and the hollow rewards patience handsomely.
Reading the Name: The Yang Valley
Two characters sketch the site. Yang 陽 means the sunny side — traditional body-topography assigns the yang surfaces to the outward-facing aspects of the limbs, so the working, outward rim of the wrist qualifies twice over. Gu 谷 means valley, and point-naming custom treats the word with some ceremony: commentators traditionally reserve gu for hollows walled by bone, distinguishing them from the shallower xi, or streams, that run between tendon ridges. The distinction has a neighbourly illustration on this very wrist: the thumb-side hollow that houses Yangxi (LI5), the Yang Stream of the large intestine channel, lies between two taut tendons, while the present hollow sits walled between two bones. Read together, Yanggu is the valley of the yang side — a sheltered floor between bony slopes, where the channel’s waters were imagined gathering depth.
The valley carries an official title. 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 and blood gathering force as they move from the fingertips inward. Yanggu holds the river office on the small intestine channel: the stage where the current, having gathered through the smaller stations, broadens and steadies for its climb toward the head. The five-phase tables add a colour to the office: the river seats of the yang channels correspond to fire, and the small intestine itself counts among the fire channels of the hand. Later commentators took evident pleasure in the doubling — fire seated upon fire at a watering-place called Valley — and the layered image stayed in view whenever practitioners weighed one station of a channel against another.
Pinyin renders the name Yánggǔ, a rising second tone on yang and a dipping third tone on gu. The hanzi pair 陽谷 is short enough to memorise at a glance, and like many points named for landscape — gates, ravines, courtyards, seas — the metaphor does genuine work rather than decorating. It says the tradition treats this spot as living terrain: a low place where currents gather, a station of confluence rather than a mere milestone. The name is itself a small set of instructions. Approach as water would — settle low, take the hollow’s own depth, let the current broaden — and the point introduces itself on those terms.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded indications read: swelling of the neck and jaw, pain along the outer arm and wrist, headache, dizziness, toothache, tinnitus, deafness, febrile disease, and mania and epilepsy. The list organises itself naturally. First come the local matters: the point lives on the wrist, and pain along the outer arm and wrist headed classical selection for the plain reason that the tradition treated trouble along the road at stations upon the road itself. Swelling of the neck and jaw belonged, in the era’s reading, to heat gathering and pooling along the channel’s climb toward the cheek — a congestion imagined in much the terms a farmer might use for a stream dammed partway down its course.
Then comes the long headward cluster: headache, dizziness, toothache, ringing ears, failing hearing. Because classical texts drew the pathway arriving at the cheek and face, the whole head-and-face territory fell within this channel’s reach, and practitioners reached along its line for complaints of temple, jaw, and ear. Tinnitus and deafness sat high among the channel’s recorded concerns — its own summary ties the route to ear territory — and the wrist served as a convenient station from which to attend to distant ground. Febrile disease, the era’s category for feverish illness, joined the portfolio with the water imagery lending a hand: a valley, commentators observed, is where heat finds room to drain. Mania and epilepsy appear as the medicine of the period honestly cataloguing grave 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, spine tall but unforced, forearm resting so the wrist stays loose. Bring the pads of the index and middle fingers together and rest them — pads, never tips — in the dip. Spend the first few breaths in simple contact, then add small, slow circles, letting the skin glide over the firm floor beneath rather than grinding against bone. Pressure should register as pleasant dullness or mild spreading warmth, never sharpness. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, matched where possible to slow exhales. Swap hands and repeat, keeping the two sessions symmetrical.
Quality matters more than duration. Light, patient, regularly repeated contact fits the wellness register this page practises; hard jabbing teaches the body nothing and annoys the wrist besides. Cold hands make poor company — warm them first. Choose a quiet corner over a screen, since the practice doubles as a pause: inhale through the nose, feel ordinary life pulsing under still fingers, lean gently on the long exhale. People who keep such routines often anchor them to an existing habit — morning coffee, an afternoon stretch — because consistency, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask. A minute done calmly on most days outweighs an ambitious session attempted once.
Treat the exercise as a small ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Across weeks you may notice the area feeling less guarded, or the wrist moving more freely while you press, or nothing shifting except that you spend a minute attending to a part of yourself usually ignored. 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 and let the valley keep its peace.
Cautions and Safe Practice
This entry carries an unusual feature worth pausing on: the licensed dataset records no cautions at all for Yanggu. The contrast with some other sites is instructive — points on the chest wall or the neck carry written warnings because significant structures lie within reach of technique. At this wrist hollow, by contrast, the landmarks are bones lying close beneath the skin, and the practices recorded for the point have always kept to the surface. Yet an empty caution row is a description, not an invitation: it records where professional attention saw no special hazard, and it licenses nothing rougher than ordinary gentleness. The universal rules of sensible self-care apply here undiminished.
The practical rules fit in a breath. Use finger pads only — no elbows, knuckles, or tools. Work on healthy skin, skipping the point over cuts, rashes, or any swelling whose cause you cannot name. After a recent wrist injury, fracture, or surgery, wait until a clinician has cleared ordinary activity before resuming any point work. Pregnant readers should consult a qualified practitioner before adding new point practice of any kind. Stop signals are absolute: sharp, electric, or numbing sensation radiating into the hand means stop at once, and nothing more that day. Sensation at a true find feels dull and diffuse; anything bright and travelling is the body declining the visit.
And the standing rule rises over everything: this page is educational, and acupressure is self-care, not diagnosis or therapy. Seek prompt medical care — not a longer pressing session — after a fall onto the wrist followed by deformity, severe swelling, or a hand that will not move normally; for numbness or weakness that persists; for headache that is sudden and severe or arrives with fever, stiff neck, or vision change; for hearing change that persists or affects one side; for facial or dental swelling accompanied by fever; and for dizziness that worsens or keeps returning. Persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner — Western medicine or East Asian medicine, whichever suits the complaint. The valley imagery is charming, but the safest gift Yanggu offers most people is a kinder acquaintance with their own wrists.
On the little-finger side of the wrist, Yanggu — the Yang Valley — occupies a soft hollow wedged between two firm bony neighbours. As the small intestine channel’s river point, it drew classical attention for complaints of the head, jaw, ear, and the arm it lives on. This guide shows how to find it by touch and press it kindly, within honest limits.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- Do I need to know the word “ulnar” to find Yanggu?
- No — “little-finger side” says everything the term does. The whole search reduces to three touches: find the small bump at the wrist end of the forearm’s little-finger bone, slide your fingertip toward the hand into the soft dip that follows it, and note the rounded mound where the dip ends. Turning the palm toward your chest first rotates the rim of the wrist into view, making all three features easier to see. The anatomical vocabulary merely names what your fingers already know how to feel.
- The dataset records no cautions for this point — do the usual rules still apply?
- Yes, undiminished. An empty caution row describes where professional records noted no special hazard; it is not permission for force. Keep contact superficial, pads only, on healthy skin; skip the point over unexplained swelling and after any fresh wrist injury; and treat sharp, electric, or radiating sensation as a stop sign for the day. Those few habits cover nearly everything that ever goes wrong in home acupressure, at this point or any other.
- What did classical practice use Yanggu for?
- The traditional record lists swelling of the neck and jaw, pain along the outer arm and wrist, headache, dizziness, toothache, tinnitus, deafness, febrile disease, and historic entries for mania and epilepsy. Classical theory honoured the point as the river station of its channel, which suited it to complaints along the pathway’s climb from wrist to face. Those frameworks are documented for cultural context — they are not evidence-backed treatment claims, and modern evidence around any single point remains thin.
- Why is this point a valley when the nearby thumb-side point is a stream?
- Naming custom, as commentators passed it down, distinguishes gu — valleys, hollows walled by bone — from xi, streams running between tendon ridges. The two names meet almost symmetrically on the same wrist: Yangxi (LI5), the Yang Stream, occupies the tendon-bounded hollow on the thumb side, while Yanggu, the Yang Valley, sits bone-walled on the little-finger side. The paired names made the geography legible to classical readers at a glance, and they still reward anyone who learns to read them.
- When should wrist or head trouble go beyond self-care?
- Whenever warning signs appear: a fall onto the wrist followed by deformity, marked swelling, or a hand that will not move normally; numbness or weakness that persists; headache that is sudden and severe, or accompanied by fever, stiff neck, or vision change; hearing change that lasts or affects one side; facial or dental swelling with fever. Think of self-care and medicine as different floors of one building — daily comfort lives downstairs, and clinical assessment keeps the upstairs consulting room you visit when symptoms persist, worsen, or frighten you. Neither floor 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 SI5 Yanggu — 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/si5/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/si5/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/si5/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "SI5",
"name": {
"en": "Yanggu",
"gloss": "Yang Valley",
"zh-Hant": "陽谷",
"zh-Hans": "阳谷"
},
"channel": {
"id": "SI",
"order": 5,
"of": 19
},
"location": {
"text": "On the outer wrist, little-finger side, in the dip between the knob of the forearm bone and the wrist bone."
},
"for": [
"outer wrist and arm pain",
"ringing ears",
"toothache"
],
"press": {
"text": "Two finger pads, slow circles, one minute each wrist.",
"seconds": 60
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/si5",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}