清冷淵 Qinglengyuan
“Clear Cold Deep Pool” · TH11
Hand Shaoyang · 11 of 23
Where. With the elbow bent, three finger-widths above the tip of the elbow.
For. Aching arm; headache; stiff neck.
Press. Gentle finger pressure, about a minute each arm.
清冷淵二穴，在肘上二寸，伸肘舉臂取之按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Qinglengyuan Sits on the Upper Arm
Qinglengyuan belongs to the outer aspect of the upper arm, on the line where the back of the arm meets the side. The dataset locates it with the elbow flexed, two cun directly above the tip of the elbow, one cun above Tianjing (TH10). The tip in question is the olecranon, the blunt bony point you can pinch at the back of the bent elbow. As ever, the cun is a proportional unit taken from the body being examined — about one thumb-width for most adults — so the distance is measured against your own frame rather than a ruler. Two thumb-widths straight up the arm from that bony tip, holding the same line, is where tradition plants this pool.
Under the fingertips the territory belongs to the triceps, the muscle that straightens the elbow, whose broad belly fills the back of the upper arm; deeper still lies the humerus, the single long bone of the arm. Directly above, in this vocabulary, means along the straight line running from the elbow tip toward the shoulder while the elbow stays bent — not out to the side, not around to the front. Because the muscle here is thick and well padded, the point registers less as a dramatic hollow than as a change in the quality of the tissue; patience, not force, is what finds it. Everything worth noticing happens close to the surface of contact.
Neighbours make the address easier to trust. One cun below sits Tianjing (TH10), tucked into the depression just above the elbow tip — a landmark classical location treats as an anchor for the whole stretch of arm above it. Higher still the chain continues: Xiaoluo (TH12) is recorded midway between Qinglengyuan and Naohui (TH13), so the line of stations climbs steadily from elbow toward shoulder. Finding any one of them by counting up from the olecranon, then checking that the next neighbour falls where expected, turns a vague search into a calm survey. If the spacing feels wrong, the simplest remedy is to start again at the elbow tip.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit upright on a firm chair and bend the left elbow to a comfortable right angle, letting the forearm hang loose so the upper-arm muscles soften. With the right hand, find the pointed bone at the back of the bent elbow and rest two fingertips on it. Walk those fingers straight up the back of the arm toward the shoulder for about two thumb-widths, keeping to the centre line of the triceps, until you sense the muscle belly thickening under a light touch. Cross-check by dropping back down one thumb-width to confirm the soft hollow above the elbow tip that marks Tianjing, then returning up to the spot. Swap hands and repeat on the other side.
A few quiet confirmations help. Touch feather-light first and compare the two arms: many people notice a faint, dull awareness at the true point and little sensation a finger-width away. Bend and straighten the elbow slowly — the tissue under your fingertips tightens and releases as the triceps works, and the point keeps its place on that moving stage rather than wandering to the edges. Check the line as well as the height: the spot should sit on the midline of the back of the arm, not on its inner or outer border. If everything feels ambiguous, press lighter rather than harder, because firm pressure flattens exactly the distinctions you are trying to notice.
Common mistakes fall into three groups. First, sliding forward onto the truly lateral face of the arm, toward the muscle that raises the arm sideways — Qinglengyuan stays behind that line, on the back of the arm. Second, mistaking the bony bump on the inner side of the elbow for the olecranon; the true reference is the point at the very back of the bent joint. Third, measuring downward from somewhere mid-arm instead of upward from the elbow tip, which strands the search anywhere along the muscle. When in doubt, re-find the bony tip and count upward once, slowly — the sequence is short enough to repeat until it settles.
Reading the Name: Clear Cold Deep Pool
The name paints a picture in three layers of imagery. Qing 清 means clear or limpid, the transparency of settled water; leng 冷 is cold, the chill of shade and stone; yuan 淵 is a deep pool, the dark stillness where a current slows and gathers. Read together, Qinglengyuan is the clear, cold deep pool — tradition imagining a pocket of cool, collected qi lying quietly in the muscular heat of a working arm. Point-names lean often on water language: streams, marshes, ravines, wells and pools mark the places where the tradition pictures qi collecting rather than passing, and this name announces at once which kind of place it believes this to be.
Pinyin renders the name Qīnglěngyuān: a high, level first tone on qing, a dipping third tone on leng, and a return to the high, level first tone on yuan. The hanzi 清冷淵 are simple enough to hold in mind at a glance, and like most channel names built from landscape — gates, valleys, courtyards, pools — the metaphor carries information. It suggests depth, coolness and gathering: qualities the tradition associates with a stretch where flow pauses above the busy country of the elbow. Learning to say the name correctly is a small act of respect for the source material, and the three syllables are pleasant enough to repeat.
Position gives the name its setting. Qinglengyuan stands as the eleventh of the San Jiao channel’s twenty-three stations, midway along a route that begins at the ring finger and climbs the outside of the arm to finish near the temple. Below it lies Tianjing, above it Xiaoluo, so the pool sits in the middle of the channel’s climb past the elbow — just where a fast-moving stream might slow and deepen. Classical naming tends to mark such pauses. Whether or not one takes the imagery literally, it encodes the practical observation that this stretch of arm, where muscle gathers over bone, holds a distinct quality of its own.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The dataset records five traditional indications: aching pain of the arm, paralysis of the upper limb, headache, eye pain, and a stiff painful neck. Take them in order. Aching pain of the arm is the plainest case: a point sitting mid-belly on the arm’s own channel line is the obvious nearby candidate when the arm itself aches, and classical practice treated such spots as first addresses for complaints of their neighbourhood. Paralysis of the upper limb needs translating: the old records grouped under that heading a wide range of weakness, heaviness and difficulty lifting the arm, understood through channel-flow ideas rather than modern neurology. It is a historical category, best read as tradition reaching for the whole weakened limb.
Headache and eye pain look stranger from an arm point until the channel map is consulted. The San Jiao channel rises from the ring finger, travels the outside of the forearm and upper arm, crosses the shoulder country and finishes near the temple — the side of the head, close beside the eye. Classical selection therefore treated points along the lower reaches of a channel as candidates for complaints at its far end, the way pulling a rope low moves its far end high. A stiff painful neck fits the middle of that rope: the channel passes through the shoulder region on its way up, so stiffness there was read as congestion along the very stretch Qinglengyuan overlooks.
These are traditional uses, recorded in a licensed dataset and classical literature and offered here for cultural and historical understanding. They are not claims that pressing this point treats any condition, and nothing here replaces assessment by a qualified clinician. Where modern research has touched self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and heavily dependent on context, and evidence tied to any single point remains thin. Hold the tradition lightly and hold the safety rules firmly; both can be true at once, and this page tries to keep both in view.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point found, set up as before: seated, elbow comfortably bent, shoulders heavy and released. Rest the pads of two fingers — never the tips — on the spot and begin with contact alone for a few breaths. Add small, slow circles, letting the skin travel over the muscle rather than grinding through it. 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, timed to slow exhales so each circle rides the breath out. Finish by swapping hands and giving the other arm the same attention, keeping the two sessions symmetrical.
Quality outranks duration. Light, patient, regularly repeated contact fits the wellness register this page practises; hard jabbing teaches the body nothing and risks bruising the muscle belly. Warm cold hands before starting, since chilled muscle guards against touch. Choose a quiet corner over a screen and let the minute of pressure double as a breathing pause: inhale through the nose, feel the upper arm soften under still fingers, lean gently on the long exhale. People who keep such routines usually anchor them to something already habitual — the morning wash, an afternoon stretch break — because consistency, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask of a person.
Treat the exercise as a small ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Across weeks you might notice the arm feels less guarded, that pressing coincides with easier breathing, or simply that you have spent ninety seconds attending to a part of the body that carries things all day without complaint. Every one of those outcomes sits honestly inside the scope of self-acupressure. What sits outside it is escalation — pressing harder, longer or deeper to force a result. When curiosity pulls that way, come back to gentleness, or let the day’s practice end early. The pool does not reward dredging.
Cautions and Safe Practice
The licensed record lists no specific caution for this entry, and that fact deserves careful handling: an absence of warnings is permission for gentleness, not for force. The general rules governing every point apply here in full. This page concerns self-acupressure only — fingertip contact on the body’s surface — and stays well short of professional treatment, which is a different discipline carried out under trained hands and not something to improvise at home. Whatever form the practice takes, it should remain light, unhurried, and reversible at a moment’s notice.
Practical rules for the home practitioner follow plainly. Keep pressure light and superficial, using finger pads, never elbows, knuckles or tools. Skip the point over broken, irritated or inflamed skin, and during any feverish illness. Stop at once on sharp, electric or radiating sensation, and do not retry that day. Pregnant readers, and anyone living with a diagnosed neurological condition, persistent numbness or tingling in the arm, or recent arm injury or surgery, should ask a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice. None of these rules costs anything; together they are the difference between a sustainable habit and a short-lived experiment.
And the wider rule stands over everything: this page is educational, self-acupressure is comfort practice, and neither diagnoses nor treats disease. Seek prompt professional care — not a longer pressing session — for headaches that are severe, sudden or unlike your usual ones; for new weakness, numbness or clumsiness of an arm; for eye pain accompanied by visual change; or for neck pain following injury. Persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner, medical or East Asian medical as suits the complaint. Used within those fences, Qinglengyuan offers most people something modest and real: a few quiet minutes of informed attention to a hard-working arm.
Qinglengyuan, the Clear Cold Deep Pool, rides the back of the upper arm two cun above the elbow tip, a watering hole of the San Jiao channel on its long climb from ring finger to temple. Classical practice returned to it for aching arms, stiff necks, headaches, and eye pain. This guide walks through finding it by touch and pressing it safely.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Qinglengyuan without knowing anything about cun?
- Use the elbow tip as the whole map. Bend the arm, pinch the blunt bone at the back of the elbow, then walk two of your own thumb-widths straight up the centre of the back of the arm toward the shoulder. The slight thickening of muscle you meet there — one thumb-width above the hollow that marks Tianjing — is the location the dataset describes. Cun measurements simply encode the same landmark walk in proportional language.
- Is pressing Qinglengyuan myself actually safe?
- Gentle fingertip pressure held on the surface is generally reasonable self-care for healthy adults, and the licensed dataset records no specific caution for this point. That reassures gentle practice, not force: the muscle here is substantial, and soreness comes from impatience rather than anatomy. Respect the stop signals — sharp, electric or radiating sensation, or discomfort that worsens, all mean finish immediately.
- What did classical practice use Qinglengyuan for?
- The traditional record lists aching pain of the arm, paralysis of the upper limb, headache, eye pain, and a stiff painful neck. Classical texts describe the San Jiao channel running past this point from ring finger to temple, which is why both arm complaints and head-and-eye complaints fill its historic portfolio. Those are traditional frameworks for understanding the body, documented for context — not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- Why would an arm point be chosen for headache or eye discomfort?
- Because classical point selection follows the channel rather than the symptom map. The San Jiao pathway climbs from the ring finger along the outside of the arm to finish near the temple, beside the eye, so points along its lower stretches were treated as candidates for complaints at its far end — the logic of a rope moved at one end moving at the other. It is elegant traditional reasoning, offered here as context rather than as a claim of effect.
- Can acupressure at Qinglengyuan replace seeing a doctor?
- No. Self-acupressure is a comfort practice, not diagnosis or therapy. Headaches that are sudden and severe, new weakness or numbness of a limb, eye pain with changed vision, or neck pain after injury need prompt professional assessment, whatever comforts you use at home alongside. Daily self-care lives downstairs; clinical medicine keeps the consulting room upstairs for when symptoms persist or escalate. 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 and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for TH11 Qinglengyuan — location and action 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/th11/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/th11/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/th11/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "TH11",
"name": {
"en": "Qinglengyuan",
"gloss": "Clear Cold Deep Pool",
"zh-Hant": "清冷淵",
"zh-Hans": "清冷渊"
},
"channel": {
"id": "TH",
"order": 11,
"of": 23
},
"location": {
"text": "With the elbow bent, three finger-widths above the tip of the elbow."
},
"for": [
"aching arm",
"headache",
"stiff neck"
],
"press": {
"text": "Gentle finger pressure, about a minute each arm.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Tongren Shuxue Zhenjiu Tujing, lower book",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/th11",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}