公孫 Gongsun
“Duke’s Grandson” · SP4
Foot Taiyin · 4 of 21 · luo-connecting, eight-confluent point (opens the chong vessel)
Where. On the inner arch, about a thumb-width behind Taibai (SP3), in the dip below the base of the long foot bone.
For. Stomach ache, vomiting, poor sleep.
Press. Thumb pad, slow circles, one minute each foot.
公孫，在足大指本節後一寸按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Gongsun Sits on the Inner Foot
Turn to the inner border of the foot — the side where the big toe faces its partner — and you stand at the entrance to Gongsun’s neighborhood. The dataset places it on the medial side of the foot, anteroinferior to the base of the first metatarsal bone, at the junction of the red and white skin. Every term decodes into something you can see or feel. The first metatarsal is the long bone of the arch that carries the big toe; its base is the rearward end of that bone, where it broadens noticeably to meet the bones of the midfoot. Anterior means toward the toes, inferior means down toward the sole; the point therefore sits on the front-lower slope of that broadening, not on the swelling itself. And the junction of the red and white skin is the traditional name for the faint boundary where the paler, thicker sole-side skin gives way to the thinner, deeper-toned skin over the top of the foot — a colour shift usually visible before anything is touched.
What lies beneath deserves a gentle hand. The hollow occupies the transition where the metatarsal’s widening settles back into the shaft, cushioned by soft tissue, with the slender tendon and ligament fibers that steady the inner arch gathering close beneath. Skin here lies thin over firm ground, and sensory endings crowd the region, because feet are built to report the ground in detail. That sensitivity is a gift to this practice: sensation arrives early, long before force could matter, which makes heavy pressure pointless as well as unkind. A site this close to load-bearing bone rewards patient, featherweight contact and answers nothing to jabbing.
Neighbors confirm the address. Counting up the inner border from the tip of the big toe, the channel opens at Yinbai (SP1) hugging the medial corner of the toenail; Dadu (SP2) waits on the toe-facing side of the great knuckle; Taibai (SP3) sits just behind the knuckle where the bone eases into its shaft; then, further up the arch, the bone visibly swells into its base, and the shallow hollow on the front-lower face of that swelling — still riding the colour boundary — is Gongsun. Beyond it, Shangqiu (SP5) rests in the depression before the inner anklebone. Notice the tidy sequence: the points between nail and ankle stake out the whole inner border, each answering for one stretch of it. Once you can find the swelling at the rear of the arch, you hold the map’s hardest landmark.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Settle somewhere comfortable and give the foot a stable perch — cross that ankle over the opposite knee, or rest the foot flat and let it roll gently inward so the inner border faces you. With the other hand, find the big-toe knuckle first: flex the toe once and feel where it moves. Now walk your exploring thumb up the inner edge of the arch, riding the faint colour line, past the knuckle, past the long stretch of shaft, until the bone broadens unmistakably under your thumb at the rear of the arch. From the crown of that broadening, slide a little way toward the toes and a little way down toward the sole, into the shallow dip on the front-lower slope. Check the address twice: the spot should sit on the colour boundary and lie clearly short of the ankle. That dip is the whole of the location.
Two quiet confirmations earn their keep. First, compare sides with feather-light taps: many people notice a faint, dull awareness at the true point and almost nothing a few millimeters away. Second, change the foot’s posture — curling the toes downward tightens the arch and tends to sharpen the edges of the hollow, while letting the foot go slack softens everything again; a spot that announces itself in one posture and hides in the other is behaving exactly like this location. If your thumb lands on bare, rounded bone, you are sitting on the swelling itself rather than its front-lower skirt; ease forward and down a fraction and search again. None of this probing should hurt — discomfort during location usually means too much pressure rather than the wrong place.
Common slips are predictable. Stopping too early leaves you at Taibai’s hollow beside the knuckle; the tell is that the root of the big toe still dominates beneath your thumb, where the true site feels squarely of the arch. Overshooting carries you toward the depression before the inner anklebone, which belongs to Shangqiu. Drifting up onto the top of the foot abandons the colour line for thinner, more sensitive skin. And using a fingernail instead of the pad turns a gentle search into a poke, so trim nails and let the fleshy pad work throughout. When confusion wins, shake the foot loose, set it down again, and begin once more from the knuckle; the landmarks have never moved.
Reading the Name: Duke’s Grandson
The name arrives dressed for court. Gong 公 was the loftiest title of the old feudal order — a duke, lord of a realm, and by extension any venerable elder accorded that respect. Sun 孫 means grandchild, descendant — the generation that continues a house. Joined, Gongsun named the descendants of dukes: in ancient China it stood as an aristocratic lineage surname, so bound up with noble birth that traditional accounts even record it as the clan name of the Yellow Emperor himself. Pinyin writes it Gōngsūn, and the melody is unusually simple: both syllables ride the first tone, a high, level pitch held steady from start to finish — gōng and sūn alike. The two characters 公孫 are plain enough to memorise at a glance, and like so many channel points named for human society — palaces, markets, courtyards, storehouses — the metaphor does real work rather than decorating.
Why would a point on the inner arch bear a lineage name? Because this is the spleen channel’s luo-connecting point: the station where, classical teaching says, the channel dispatches a collateral branch that walks across to join the stomach channel. Tradition imagined the channel system as a family tree, and its vocabulary kept the image alive — the finest twig-vessels of the body were called sun luo, grandchild-networks, the youngest generation of the circulation. A connecting point is precisely where the senior line sends out a new branch, so commentators through the centuries have delighted in the fit between name and duty: the main channel the elder line, the collateral the enterprising grandson setting off to visit a neighboring household — the stomach channel being exactly that neighbor, the spleen’s lifelong partner in the work of digestion.
A second layer of office attaches here. Classical teaching recognises eight points on the limbs that communicate with the eight extraordinary vessels — deep reservoir channels outside the regular dozen — and Gongsun is recorded as the one that opens the chong vessel. The classics styled the chong vessel among the great seas of the body, associating it with blood and with the breadth of all twelve channels, and in practical discussion they paired Gongsun with Neiguan on the inner forearm, the point that opens the chong vessel’s partner vessel. These are lenses for reading the literature — ways the tradition organised its own experience — not laboratory findings, and this page holds them in exactly that spirit.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded indications read: stomachache, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, dysentery, irritability, insomnia, mania, and rebellious qi rushing to the heart. The first five form one household. Classical practice paired spleen and stomach as the middle burner’s working partnership, charged with transforming food and moving fluids onward; and because the collateral dispatched from this very point was understood to join the stomach channel, a spleen point that speaks for the stomach follows the tradition’s own grammar perfectly. Hence the familiar cluster: dull ache around the stomach region, contents refusing to stay down or hurrying through, griping and blocked sensations across the abdomen. Dysentery deserves a careful note: the old records used the word for a pattern of frequent, urgent, straining stools, sometimes with mucus or blood. Any bowel episode involving blood, fever, or relentless urgency belongs promptly with medical assessment today — that boundary is modern, and this page keeps it brightly painted.
Then the register shifts to the spirit. Irritability, insomnia, and mania stand on the same list because classical physiology wove digestion, qi, and mind into one cloth: the heart was given custody of the shen — the spirit — and the spleen was said to house yi, the faculty of thought. When the middle burner faltered, or when qi abandoned its proper descent, the records read the disturbance as climbing to trouble the heart. The last entry names that climb directly: rebellious qi rushing to the heart, a traditional picture of qi surging upward from the lower abdomen toward the chest, for which the classics kept vividly named patterns. Because Gongsun was the point that opened the chong vessel, practice reached for it whenever such rising was suspected — the classification and the indication explaining one another, as they so often do in this literature.
It bears repeating plainly: these are the traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset and classical literature, offered here for cultural and historical understanding. They are not claims that pressing this point treats any condition, and nothing in this guide substitutes for assessment by a qualified clinician. Where modern research has touched self-applied acupressure at all, reviews suggest effects tend to be modest and dependent on context, and evidence specific to any single point remains sparse. Hold the tradition lightly and the safety rules firmly, and the two will never collide.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point located by the walkthrough above, settle into position: seated, the located ankle resting where you can reach it without hunching. Bring the pad of your opposite thumb onto the hollow and begin with bare contact — a few unhurried breaths carrying no pressure beyond the weight of the thumb itself. Then add small, slow circles, letting the skin glide over the tissue rather than grinding against the bone beneath. Aim for a pleasant dullness, perhaps a mild warmth spreading along the inner arch; any sharpness anywhere in the experience is a cue to lighten or stop. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, with the circles riding gently on each exhale. Swap feet and give the other side its turn, keeping the two sessions symmetrical.
Feet ask for particular kindness, and the arch asks for more than most. It carries your weight all day, arrives guarded after hours in shoes, and hides its landmarks under padding — so warm your hands first, consider a few steps around the room to wake the foot, and halve whatever pressure feels normal elsewhere. Quality beats duration: two minutes of genuinely light, attentive contact serves the practice better than ten absent-minded ones. Many people anchor the routine to an existing habit — the evening shoe-off moment, a winding-down pause on the sofa — because regularity, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually request.
Treat the minutes as a small ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Across weeks you may notice the area feeling less tender, the arch feeling more alive under your thumb, or simply that you spent ninety seconds attending to a part of yourself that carries you everywhere — every outcome inside the honest scope of self-acupressure. What falls outside it is escalation: pressing harder, longer, or more sharply to force a result. Curiosity that pulls that way is best answered by returning to gentleness, or by closing the practice for the day. The duke’s grandson has waited centuries already; he can wait until tomorrow.
Cautions and Safe Practice
The licensed dataset records no special cautions for this point, and it is worth stating that plainly — together with what it does not mean. An empty caution column is not an invitation to force. Thin skin over load-bearing bone, tendon and ligament fibers gathered close beneath, and densely packed sensory endings mean this neighborhood rewards exactly the light, purely superficial contact this page recommends everywhere else, and it punishes jabbing. Never press hard onto the bony swelling, never work with a tool or device, and never push sensation beyond pleasant dullness.
Conservative defaults cover the rest. Skip the point entirely over cuts, blisters, cracked or peeling skin, athlete’s foot, warts, or any broken skin along the inner border; leave it alone while a foot injury heals, and after recent foot or ankle surgery until ordinary walking feels comfortable again or a clinician clears it. If the arch is hot, swollen, or acutely painful — as happens in gout flares and arthritic episodes, which hold a famous fondness for the feet — press nowhere near it and let the inflammation settle first. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation means stop at once and do not retry that day. Pregnant readers, and anyone living with diabetes, reduced foot sensation, or poor circulation, do best to consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice. When in doubt, ask first; the question costs nothing.
Red flags outrank routines. Persistent vomiting, severe or worsening abdominal pain, blood in the stool, a true fever, and sleeplessness or agitation that persists or frightens you all call for prompt medical assessment, not a pressing schedule — the older entries in this point’s list, mania chief among them, described states that belong with professionals in every era. And the standing rule above everything: this page is educational, self-acupressure is comfort-oriented daily care rather than diagnosis or therapy, and persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner. A hollow on the inner arch makes a poor clinic; save the real clinics for the professionals who staff them.
Gongsun — “duke’s grandson” — waits on the inner border of the arch, in a shallow hollow just ahead of and below the spot where the long bone behind the big toe swells into its base. Classical practice kept this connecting point close for stomachache, vomiting, and unruly middles. This guide walks through finding it by touch and pressing it safely.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Gongsun without knowing anything about cun?
- Use the arch as the whole map. Flex the big toe to find its knuckle, then walk your thumb up the inner edge along the faint colour line until the bone visibly broadens at the rear of the arch. Settle into the shallow dip on the front-lower slope of that broadening, still on the colour line and clearly short of the ankle. Nothing needs measuring: the cun language in formal locations encodes the same landmarks proportionally.
- Is pressing so close to the arch bone really safe?
- Gentle fingertip pressure held on intact skin is generally reasonable self-care for healthy adults, because the technique engages skin and superficial tissue far short of anything a bone or joint would mind. The realistic risks come from hard or repeated jabbing on a load-bearing spot, or pressing through broken or inflamed skin — categories this practice simply excludes. Respect the stop signals: sharp pain, radiating sensation, or discomfort that worsens all mean finish immediately.
- What did classical practice use Gongsun for?
- The traditional record lists stomachache, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, dysentery, irritability, insomnia, mania, and rebellious qi rushing to the heart. Classical frameworks explain the grouping: as the spleen channel’s connecting point it was read as speaking for both partners of the middle burner, and as the opener of the chong vessel it was consulted for rising, restless qi that troubled the heart. Those are traditional ways of mapping the body, documented for context — not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why does one point carry both stomach complaints and spirit entries?
- Because the tradition wired the two territories together. The collateral from this point was taught to join the stomach channel, making it a natural address for the digestive cluster; meanwhile the heart, custodian of the spirit, was understood to be disturbed when the middle burner weakened or qi rose instead of settling. One point stood at the junction of those stories — correspondence geography rather than plumbing, but coherent on its own terms.
- Can acupressure at Gongsun take the place of seeing a doctor?
- No. Self-acupressure offers comfort, not diagnosis. Ongoing vomiting, severe or worsening abdominal pain, blood in the stool, fever, or persistent sleeplessness and agitation need professional assessment promptly. Picture two floors of one building: daily self-care lives downstairs, and clinical medicine keeps the consulting room upstairs for when symptoms persist or escalate. Neither replaces the other, and the downstairs tenant should always send serious matters upstairs.
Sources
- 01WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region (2008), World Health Organization — location conventions.
- 02A Manual of Acupuncture, Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji and Kevin Baker — point-name tradition, luo-connecting and eight-confluent classifications, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for SP4 Gongsun — 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/sp4/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/sp4/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/sp4/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "SP4",
"name": {
"en": "Gongsun",
"gloss": "Duke’s Grandson",
"zh-Hant": "公孫",
"zh-Hans": "公孙"
},
"channel": {
"id": "SP",
"order": 4,
"of": 21
},
"location": {
"text": "On the inner arch, about a thumb-width behind Taibai (SP3), in the dip below the base of the long foot bone."
},
"for": [
"stomach ache",
"vomiting",
"poor sleep"
],
"press": {
"text": "Thumb pad, slow circles, one minute each foot.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/sp4",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}