The top of the lung and large vessels lie beneath; keep it light.
缺盆 Quepen
“Broken Basin” · ST12
Foot Yangming · 12 of 45
Where. In the middle of the hollow above the collarbone, roughly in line with the nipple.
For. Cough, shortness of breath, sore throat.
Press. Light touch only, about a minute each side; do not push down.
Caution. The top of the lung and large vessels lie beneath; keep it light.
缺盆，一名天蓋，在肩上橫骨陷者中按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Quepen Sits: The Hollow Above the Collarbone
The dataset places Quepen in the centre of the supraclavicular fossa, four cun lateral to the anterior midline. Unpacked, that means this: run a fingertip down the front of the neck until it rests in the notch at the top of the breastbone, then travel sideways — the recorded distance is four cun, the traditional proportional unit taken from the person’s own body — and you arrive at a line passing over the middle stretch of the collarbone. Directly above that middle stretch lies a shallow, triangular hollow framed by the neck muscles behind and the shoulder in front, and the point stands at the centre of that hollow. Everyone carries the mirror image on both sides, and the record treats the pair alike.
What lies beneath deserves the respect the dataset itself asks for. From the skin of the fossa downward, a practitioner meets little more than a thin, flat muscular sheet before reaching structures that have no business meeting pressure: the dome of the lung rising above the level of the collarbone, the pleural membrane that wraps it, and the subclavian vessels crossing toward the arm. The licensed caution states this plainly — needling here is done with care, never deeply or straight down, and never directed toward the chest cavity. For fingertip self-care the lesson is simpler still: everything interesting about this point happens within a coin’s thickness of the surface, and nothing in a home practice needs to go further.
The neighbourhood helps confirm the address. One station up the neck, Qishe (ST11) perches on the upper border of the clavicle’s medial end, tucked between the two heads of the large muscle that turns the head; it belongs to the throat end of the corridor. One station down, Qihu (ST13) waits on the chest at the lower border of the clavicle’s midpoint. Reading the three together shows the channel stepping down the side of the throat, over the rim of the basin, and onto the front of the chest — and it shows why a finger resting in the wrong hollow, one hollow too near the throat or one shelf too low, has found a neighbour instead.
Finding Quepen by Touch
Sit upright on a firm chair, feet flat, shoulders heavy and released so the neck softens. With your left hand, find the notch at the base of the front of the throat — the V where the collarbones meet the breastbone. Walk your fingers outward along the upper edge of the right collarbone until you reach its middle stretch, about halfway between the breastbone end and the shoulder end. Just above the bone there, feel for a shallow triangular hollow: the supraclavicular fossa. Settle the pads of your index and middle fingers into the very centre of it, level with the recorded four cun from the midline, and repeat the whole search on the other side.
Two quiet checks settle the matter. First, compare sides with a feather-light touch: many people notice a faint, dull awareness at the true centre of the hollow and almost nothing a thumb-width away. Second, trace the collarbone beneath your fingertips — the point should sit directly above its middle stretch, not above the inner end where Qishe keeps company with the throat, and not out near the outer bend where the bone turns toward the shoulder. Let the shoulders roll slowly back and down; the hollow visibly deepens as they move, confirming your finger rests in the basin rather than on bare bone or a taut muscle cord.
The common slips all come from hurry. Drifting toward the throat finds the inner hollow near Qishe; sliding toward the shoulder climbs the sloping roof of the fossa until the point is lost against muscle; dropping below the collarbone lands on the chest in Qihu’s territory instead. And the most important correction is not positional at all: the instinct to press firmly into the hollow to ‘make sure’ is exactly what this location does not reward. The tissues here are delicate, and the landmarks announce themselves to patient, light touch. When in doubt, return to the throat notch and walk the collarbone again from the beginning, slowly.
Reading the Name: The Broken Basin
The name is a picture of the place. Que 缺 means broken, chipped, or lacking — the character draws an earthenware jar, the vessel element fou, with a piece knocked away, and in everyday use it covers everything from a gap in a wall to something simply missing. Pen 盆 means basin: the dish element min forms the base, the character fen above lends both sound and the sense of dividing out portions, and together they sketch a wide-mouthed household vessel. Read together, Quepen renders as the broken basin or the deficient basin — a basin with something taken out of it.
Set the name beside the body and it explains itself. The hollow above the collarbone curves like a shallow bowl, and against the firm ridges of bone and muscle cord surrounding it, it can read as a basin whose rim has given way — an incomplete vessel pressed into the landscape where neck becomes shoulder. Commentators in the point-name tradition have explained the characters this way for centuries, reading geography rather than physiology: like the gates, valleys, courtyards, and storehouses scattered along the channels, the basin belongs to a family of metaphors that teach location first and theory second.
In pinyin the name is written Quēpén, and the tone marks carry their usual instructions. Quē, the first syllable, rides the first tone — a flat, level, sustained pitch, high and even the way dictionaries describe it. Pén takes the second tone, which rises steadily from middle to high as though answering a question. Spoken plainly, the name falls into two even beats, level then rising. The hanzi pair 缺盆 is compact enough to recognise at a glance, and knowing that it means broken basin turns an abstract coordinate into a landmark you can find again from memory.
A Station on the Stomach Channel’s Descent
The stomach channel draws one of the longest lines on the classical maps, and the site’s own registry sums it up in a sentence: it runs down the front of the body from face to second toe. Classical texts elaborate the journey’s opening chapters — beginning beside the nose, looping through the gum and lip territory of the lower face, climbing along the hairline to the forehead, then descending past the jaw and down the side of the throat. Along that descent the visible pathway settles into the supraclavicular hollow, and the settling place is Quepen: the doorway between the channel’s head-and-neck country and its long walk down the chest, abdomen, and leg.
Read as a sequence of stations, the neck stretch makes the geography vivid. Beside the throat sits Renying (ST9), a point the old records handle with special caution because the carotid pulse beats directly beneath it; lower still come Shuitu (ST10) and Qishe (ST11) along the border where neck meets collarbone; then the channel gathers for a moment in the basin at ST12 before resurfacing on the chest at Qihu (ST13). The numbering itself tells the story — twelve stations in, the channel crosses the clavicle — and each step of the descent carries its own recorded cautions, growing stricter wherever the great vessels and the lung’s dome draw near.
Why does a stomach-channel point appear in old records for throats and chests rather than digestion? The traditional answer is the channel map itself: within classical practice, any station along a channel could be reached for complaints arising along that channel’s course, and the stomach channel threads precisely the regions — throat, supraclavicular hollow, chest — where Quepen’s recorded indications live. The reasoning traces lines of influence in the old manner rather than organs in isolation. As a framework it is internally coherent, and it explains why the point sits where the records place it and why its historic portfolio looks the way it does.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The dataset records six traditional indications: cough; shortness of breath; a sore, swollen throat; pain within the supraclavicular fossa itself; cervical scrofula; and fullness and heat in the chest. Framed as history rather than promise, these are the complaints classical practice traditionally reached for Quepen over. Several gather naturally around the channel’s route, since throat and chest complaints cluster wherever the pathway passes. The list opens with plain cough, which in the old records sat beside shortness of breath as members of one family of disordered-breath descriptions — everything from a tickling dry cough to laboured, effortful breathing.
Two entries deserve unhurried explanation. Fullness and heat in the chest is a distinct traditional concept: a subjective weight, oppression, or stuck warmth across the chest, read as qi failing to move freely there — a cousin of the chest-fullness language that recurs throughout the classical literature. Cervical scrofula is the historical name for swellings of the lymph nodes of the neck, a condition ancient texts grouped by appearance; it recurs in the records of several neighbouring points as well. A modern reader should hear that last entry as vocabulary from another century: any new lump or persistent swelling in the neck today belongs promptly with a physician, not with a pressure routine.
It bears repeating plainly: these are the traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset and described across the classical literature, offered here for cultural and historical understanding. They are not claims that pressing this point treats disease. Where modern research touches self-applied acupressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and heavily dependent on context, and evidence specific to any single point remains thin. Hold the tradition lightly, hold the safety rules firmly, and let anything persistent be settled by a qualified practitioner.
Self-Care Acupressure, Kept Feather-Light
With the point found by the walkthrough above, arrange yourself comfortably: seated, spine tall but unforced, chin level so the front of the neck stays soft. Rest the pads of the index and middle fingers on the centre of the hollow — contact only, the weight of a coin resting on a table, nothing pushing inward or down toward the collarbone. Begin with stillness for a few slow breaths, then add the smallest circles, letting the skin glide over the surface rather than dragging across it. Sensation should register as faint dullness or mild warmth; anything sharper means less pressure, or none. A conservative home rhythm is one to three minutes on one side, then the other, once a day.
Quality outranks quantity everywhere in self-care, and doubly so here. Use finger pads only — never knuckles, elbows, massage tools, or devices — and skip the session entirely whenever you are short of breath, feverish, or nursing a raw throat. Warm hands, a quiet corner, and an unhurried minute suit this tissue better than enthusiasm does. Many people fold the practice onto an existing habit — after washing the face, before the morning coffee — because regularity, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask for. Miss a day and simply resume tomorrow; there is no backlog to repay.
Treat the few minutes as a ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Across weeks you may notice the area feels less guarded, that breathing feels smoother while your fingers rest there, or simply that you spent ninety seconds attending to your own body — and 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, least of all at a site this delicately placed. When curiosity pulls toward force, that is the signal to return to gentleness or to set the practice aside for the day.
Cautions and Safe Practice
This point carries one of the stronger cautions in the licensed record, and the reason is geography. The dataset warns practitioners to needle here with care — never deeply, never straight down, and never directed toward the chest cavity — because the dome of the lung, its thin pleural wrapping, and the subclavian vessels all lie close below the fossa. The lung rises slightly above the level of the collarbone behind this very hollow, so there is less margin than intuition suggests. Professional training manages that margin with exact technique. Home self-care manages it differently and far more simply: by never leaving the surface at all.
For fingertip acupressure the rules follow from that picture and deserve listing in full. Keep contact feather-light and purely superficial, with the intention staying in skin and the thinnest surface layer — never driven into the hollow, never angled behind the collarbone. Use pads, not tips, knuckles, elbows, or tools. Stop at once on sharp, electric, or radiating sensation, and do not retry that day. Skip the point during any acute breathing difficulty, during feverish illness, and over broken, irritated, or recently injured skin; wait for a clinician’s clearance after any neck, chest, or shoulder surgery. Pregnant readers, and anyone living with lung, heart, or circulatory conditions, 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 attention — not a pressure routine — for breathlessness at rest or on mild effort, chest pain, coughing blood, a cough that will not settle across weeks, a new lump or persistent swelling in the neck, or any symptom that frightens you. Persistent complaints belong with a licensed practitioner, medical or East Asian medical as suits the situation. The basin imagery is charming, but the safest gift Quepen offers most people is a calmer, better-informed acquaintance with the delicate ground where neck meets shoulder — treated kindly, and treated lightly.
Quepen, the Broken Basin, occupies the soft hollow centred above the collarbone where the neck gives way to the shoulder. Classical practice reached for it amid cough, laboured breath, and a sore swollen throat. This guide walks through locating it by touch, the tradition behind it, and why self-care here stays feather-light.
Cautions from the classical sources
- Needle cautiously, never deep or perpendicular. The top of the lung, the pleura, and the subclavian vessels sit just below — never aim toward the chest cavity.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Quepen without knowing anything about cun?
- Use the collarbone as the whole map. Find the notch where the collarbones meet the breastbone at the base of the throat, then follow the upper edge of either collarbone outward to its middle stretch. The shallow triangular hollow sitting directly above that midpoint is the location the dataset describes; the four-cun figure in the record simply encodes the same landmark sequence in proportional language.
- Is it safe to press Quepen myself?
- Gentle fingertip contact held on the surface is generally reasonable self-care for healthy adults, because it engages skin and the thinnest surface layers, far short of the lung dome and vessels the dataset warns about. The recorded dangers concern deep professional techniques aimed toward the chest cavity — a category home practice never approaches. Honour the stop signals: sharp pain, radiating sensation, or discomfort that worsens means finish immediately.
- What did classical practice use Quepen for?
- The traditional record lists cough, shortness of breath, sore swollen throat, pain within the supraclavicular fossa, cervical scrofula, and fullness and heat in the chest. The throat-and-chest flavour follows from the channel map, since the stomach channel threads precisely these regions on its way down the body. These are traditional frameworks documented for context — not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why does Quepen carry a stronger warning than most points?
- Because of what lies beneath: the dome of the lung rises above the collarbone behind this hollow, wrapped in pleura, with the subclavian vessels crossing nearby. The dataset therefore instructs practitioners to work with care here, never deeply or straight down. Self-care answers the same anatomy conservatively — surface-only fingertip contact, no tools, and immediate stops on any sharp or spreading sensation.
- I have noticed a small lump near my collarbone. Should I massage it?
- No. A new lump or persistent swelling in the neck or above the collarbone needs proper clinical assessment promptly; scrofula, the old term in this point’s records, belongs to historical vocabulary, not to home diagnosis. Leave the area entirely alone until a physician has looked at it, and mention any accompanying signs — fever, night sweats, weight loss — at the same visit.
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 and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for ST12 Quepen — location, 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/st12/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/st12/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/st12/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "ST12",
"name": {
"en": "Quepen",
"gloss": "Broken Basin",
"zh-Hant": "缺盆",
"zh-Hans": "缺盆"
},
"channel": {
"id": "ST",
"order": 12,
"of": 45
},
"location": {
"text": "In the middle of the hollow above the collarbone, roughly in line with the nipple."
},
"for": [
"cough",
"shortness of breath",
"sore throat"
],
"press": {
"text": "Light touch only, about a minute each side; do not push down.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [
"The top of the lung and large vessels lie beneath; keep it light."
],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/st12",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}