地倉 Dicang
“Earth Granary” · ST4
Foot Yangming · 4 of 45
Where. Just out from the corner of the mouth, in line below the pupil.
For. Drooling, a drooping mouth corner, toothache.
Press. Gentle fingertip pressure, about a minute each side.
地倉，一名會維，俠口傍四分按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Dicang Sits on the Face
The dataset locates Dicang on the face, lateral to the corner of the mouth, directly below the pupil. Unpacked into everyday anatomy, that is a small address defined by two reference lines. The first is vertical: while the gaze rests level and looking straight ahead, imagine a thread dropped straight down from the pupil toward the jaw. The second runs outward from the corner of the mouth toward the cheek. Where they meet — on the lower stretch of the pupil’s vertical line, a small step sideways from the lip corner — your fingertip has arrived at the spot the record describes.
Dicang comes as a mirrored pair, one point on each side of the face, and locating them together keeps the search honest: the two corners of the mouth should offer symmetric landmarks, and any obvious mismatch usually means a fingertip has drifted rather than that the face is uneven. The site itself is delicate territory. Facial skin lies thinly over thin muscle, and this particular spot sits close to the moist border of the lip, where dry skin quietly gives way to mucous membrane. Everything about the address invites cleanliness and a light hand.
Notice how the recorded location cross-checks itself. Neither reference alone would pin the spot down: mouths vary in width, and eyes sit at slightly different heights from one face to another, but the two lines together bracket the point tightly from above and from beside. This is typical of classical face location, which builds addresses out of visible landmarks anyone can find in a mirror rather than out of instrument measurements. It also means you need no cun arithmetic here whatsoever — the face supplies its own rulers.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Begin with freshly washed hands and a clear mirror, seated comfortably with elbows supported so the arms stay steady, jaw relaxed, gaze straight ahead. Find the vertical first: hold a fingertip loosely below one eye and let your reflection confirm the line hanging from the pupil. Next, touch the corner of the mouth on the same side — the place where the lips meet when the face is at rest. From that corner, walk the fingertip sideways toward the cheek in a short, unhurried step, keeping level with the mouth corner, until you sense you have crossed onto the vertical thread. That meeting zone is the location.
A few confirmations help before any pressing starts. Smile softly and feel the mouth corner lift and travel outward under the finger — this little patch of face rides along with the smile, which tells you how mobile the tissue here really is. Release, settle the fingertip again, and compare sides with feather-light touch: many people notice a faint dull awareness or mild tenderness at the true spot and almost nothing half a thumb-width away. If what you feel is slick lip surface instead, you have drifted inward; return outward onto the dry skin of the cheek side.
The classic slips are predictable. Some searchers stay too loyal to the mouth corner and land on the lips themselves. Others wander downward toward the jawline or upward toward the nose, leaving the pupil’s vertical line behind. And a few press inward against the teeth, which finds nothing but discomfort. The correction is always the same sequence — gaze level, thread dropped from the pupil, one small step outward from the relaxed mouth corner. The mirror makes the geometry visible: the fingertip should sit clearly outside the lip corner, roughly beneath the eye.
Reading the Name: Earth Granary
The two characters sketch a small economy of nourishment. Di 地 means earth or ground — the soil beneath the fields. Cang 倉 means granary, the storehouse where harvested grain is kept safe. Read together, Dicang is often rendered Earth Granary, and the imagery lands squarely on the neighborhood: the mouth is where grain and food enter, the first door of the body’s storage system. In pronunciation, pinyin writes the name Dìcāng — di carries the falling fourth tone, cang the high, level first tone.
The earth half of the name does extra work in this channel’s company. Five-phase thinking, the classical framework that sorts organs and channels into wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, files the stomach — together with its partner the spleen — among the organs of earth, the phase of growth, ripening, and nourishment; the site’s own meridian record marks the Stomach channel with the earth element for exactly that reason. A granary named for earth, standing at the doorway where food arrives, reads like a label written by someone who knew the whole system: intake here above, storage and transformation below.
Like many channel points, Dicang borrows its name from the vocabulary of buildings and landscapes — gates, valleys, courtyards, markets, storehouses — and the metaphor is not decoration. Names encoded what classical practitioners believed a location did. A granary receives, holds, and releases in due season; a point named granary at the mouth was understood as a keeper of what passes there — food on its way in, saliva, and the tidy closure of the lips themselves. The hanzi pair 地倉 is compact enough to memorise, and remembering it quietly teaches the point’s job.
Traditional Uses, Explained
The recorded indications read: deviation of the corner of the mouth, drooling, trigeminal neuralgia, toothache, and swelling of the cheek. Framed as history rather than promise, classical practice traditionally gathered at Dicang when the mouth lost its composure — pulling to one side, leaking saliva, or surrounded by pain and puffiness. Deviation of the mouth corner belongs to a family of traditional patterns concerning facial asymmetry, and old records approached such complaints with points strung along the channels crossing cheek and mouth. Modern readers will recognise that sudden facial drooping can signal serious illness; that recognition matters more than any pressure routine and belongs to urgent medical assessment, a rule this page returns to below.
Drooling, the second recorded indication, was read through traditional physiology: classical teaching associated clear saliva with the spleen-earth system, and a mouth that failed to hold its contents was understood as that system’s gate standing loose. Trigeminal neuralgia is the record’s modern diagnosis, naming severe, lightning-like one-sided facial pain; older literature grouped such suffering under broader headings of facial pain and approached it, by tradition, with points near where the pain surfaced — Dicang among them. Toothache and swelling of the cheek complete the list, and both fit the oldest logic of point selection: gather points close to the complaint, along the route the channel travels nearest the trouble.
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. Where modern research touches self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, and evidence tied to any single point remains thin. Sudden facial asymmetry, in particular, is never a self-care matter — it is an emergency sign demanding immediate medical attention. Hold the tradition lightly, and hold that rule absolutely.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With both points located, settle in: seated, shoulders heavy, jaw loose, hands freshly washed — this is face work beside the mouth, so cleanliness comes first. Rest the pads of the index or middle fingers on the two spots and hold simple contact for a few slow breaths. Then add small, slow circles, letting the skin glide gently over the deeper tissue rather than dragging across it. Aim for pleasant dullness or mild warmth, never sharpness; around the mouth, gentler is simply correct. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per session, once or twice daily, paired with easy exhales so each circle rides the breath out. Keep the two sides symmetrical.
Quality outweighs duration. Light, patient, regularly repeated contact suits this exposed little site far better than enthusiasm does; hard jabbing buys soreness in a place everyone can see. Warm your fingers first if they run cold, because chilled muscle guards. Choose a calm moment — after washing the face, before sleep — and anchor the practice to a habit you already keep, since consistency, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask for. If you wear lip balm or skincare, keep products away from the spots during practice and wash again afterward; the skin here prefers simple treatment.
Treat the few minutes as attention rather than therapy. Notice what actually changes across weeks: perhaps the area feels less tense, perhaps the jaw unclenches a notch, perhaps nothing shifts except that you spent two minutes caring for your own face. Every outcome in that list sits honestly inside the scope of self-acupressure. What sits outside it is escalation — pressing harder or longer to force a result the practice was never designed to deliver. When curiosity pulls toward force, return to gentleness, or set the practice down for the day.
Cautions and Safe Practice
The licensed record for Dicang carries no point-specific cautions — unlike several points elsewhere on the body whose entries write out careful warnings for professional hands. An empty caution column is not an invitation to force; it simply leaves the universal rules of sensible face care standing exactly where they always were. Facial skin is thin and quick to complain, the site borders the lips, and everything practiced here should remain gentle, superficial fingertip contact that never approaches the mouth’s moist interior.
The practical rules follow from that picture. Skip the point whenever the skin around the lips is broken, blistered, or irritated — active cold sores included — and give it a wide berth after dental work, injections, or cosmetic procedures until everything has settled. Anyone prone to attacks of facial pain should be especially conservative: if light touch triggers a spike of electric, shooting pain, stop immediately and mention the trigger to a clinician. Stop at once on sharp or radiating sensation of any kind. Pregnant readers should consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice, as should anyone managing a neurological condition.
And the larger rule stands over everything: this page is educational, and acupressure is self-care, not diagnosis or therapy. Seek prompt medical care — not a pressure routine — for sudden facial drooping or weakness, especially alongside slurred speech or limb weakness; for persistent, worsening, or one-sided facial pain; and for toothache or facial swelling that lingers, which belongs first with a dentist. Persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner. The granary image is charming, but the safest thing Dicang offers most people is a small daily ritual performed cleanly, gently, and within its limits.
Dicang, the Earth Granary, sits just outside the corner of the mouth on the Stomach channel’s brief passage across the face. Classical practice reached for it when the mouth misbehaved — pulling aside, dribbling, or aching. This guide covers finding it with a mirror and clean hands, the tradition behind the name, and gentle home practice.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Dicang without knowing anything about cun?
- Use the two reference lines. Sit before a mirror, look straight ahead, and imagine a thread dropping from the pupil toward the jaw; then find the relaxed corner of the mouth and step sideways toward the cheek. Where the vertical thread crosses just outside the mouth corner is the location. The dataset’s phrasing — lateral to the corner of the mouth, directly below the pupil — encodes exactly this landmark sequence, so no measuring is ever required.
- Is it hygienic to press a point right beside the mouth?
- It can be, with ordinary care. Wash your hands before practising, keep contact on dry outer skin rather than the lips themselves, and skip the point entirely over cold sores, cracked skin, or anything still healing after dental or cosmetic procedures. Gentle fingertip pressure on intact skin poses no special problem for healthy adults; shared tools, unwashed hands, and force are what cause trouble. Cleanliness is most of the etiquette here.
- What did classical practice use Dicang for?
- The traditional record lists deviation of the corner of the mouth, drooling, trigeminal neuralgia, toothache, and swelling of the cheek. The pattern is coherent: nearly every entry concerns the mouth and cheek, the territory this point overlooks. Classical texts grouped such complaints around the channels crossing the face, which is why a mouth-side point kept recurring in those discussions. These are documented traditional frameworks, offered for context — not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why does a face point belong to the Stomach channel?
- Classical channel theory draws the Stomach meridian beginning on the face and descending the front of the body to finish at the second toe, so the face is not foreign territory to this channel — it is the head of the route. Five-phase thinking assigns the stomach the earth element, and the point’s own name, Earth Granary, echoes that identity at the doorway where food enters. Tradition connected the face segment to the organ below through this continuous pathway.
- Can pressing Dicang replace seeing a doctor about facial droop or face pain?
- No, and the distinction matters more here than at most points. Sudden facial drooping can accompany serious acute illness and requires emergency assessment immediately, not acupressure. Persistent or severe one-sided facial pain deserves a clinician’s evaluation, and toothache belongs first with a dentist. Self-applied pressure is a comfort ritual layered on top of good medical judgment — never a substitute for it. When symptoms persist, worsen, or frighten you, choose the consulting room.
Sources
- 01aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for ST4 Dicang — location, point class, actions, and indication record.
- 02WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region (2008), World Health Organization — nomenclature conventions.
- 03A Manual of Acupuncture, Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji and Kevin Baker — point-name tradition and channel-course context.
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/st4/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/st4/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/st4/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "ST4",
"name": {
"en": "Dicang",
"gloss": "Earth Granary",
"zh-Hant": "地倉",
"zh-Hans": "地仓"
},
"channel": {
"id": "ST",
"order": 4,
"of": 45
},
"location": {
"text": "Just out from the corner of the mouth, in line below the pupil."
},
"for": [
"drooling",
"a drooping mouth corner",
"toothache"
],
"press": {
"text": "Gentle fingertip pressure, about a minute each side.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/st4",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}