肩髎 Jianliao
“Shoulder Hollow” · TH14
Hand Shaoyang · 14 of 23
Where. Lift the arm out to the side: the hollow that appears behind and below the tip of the shoulder.
For. A heavy shoulder that will not lift; arm pain.
Press. Gentle finger pressure, about a minute each shoulder.
肩髎二穴，在肩端臑上陷中，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 Jianliao Sits on the Shoulder Cap
On the shoulder itself, Jianliao occupies a hollow that posture conjures and rest conceals. The dataset places it posterior to Jianyu (LI15) — the large intestine channel’s famous front-shoulder point — in the depression below and behind the acromion that appears when the arm is abducted, lifted out sideways away from the body. The acromion is the flat bony shelf you can feel at the very tip of the shoulder, the point of the shoulder that tailors measure from; below and behind its outer end lies the soft gap this point calls home. Notice what the location does not contain: no cun measurement at all. A cun is the traditional proportional unit taken from the person being examined, but here the dataset trusts landmarks instead — a neighbour behind, a bone above, and the body’s own movement serving as the measuring stick.
What lies under the fingertips here is among the friendliest terrain on the body. The hollow sits squarely within the deltoid, the thick triangular muscle that drapes over the shoulder joint like a padded epaulette and gives the shoulder its rounded silhouette. Beneath that generous cushion lies the head of the upper-arm bone cradled in the joint — well protected by muscle and fascia, with no delicate cavity, no thin rib-gap, and no organ directly behind the skin. Pressure applied here announces itself honestly as a spreading, dull awareness through dense muscle, which makes the spot a comfortable classroom for learning how much sensation is enough. Nothing about locating this point requires strength; the landmarks introduce themselves to slow, curious fingers and stay hidden from forceful ones.
Jianliao also belongs to a small constellation of shoulder stations worth knowing together. In front sits Jianyu (LI15), whose own record describes an anteroinferior hollow below the acromion appearing on exactly the same movement, abduction — so the two points flank the great bony shelf like bookends, one belonging to the large intestine channel before it, one to the san jiao channel here. Below waits Naohui (TH13), three cun further down the outer arm on the deltoid’s posteroinferior border. Classical texts describe the san jiao pathway climbing from the ring finger along the arm’s outer face, over the shoulder, and onward toward the temple; the channel owns twenty-three stations in all, and Jianliao is the highest station it claims on the arm itself — beyond here the route steps onto the shoulder blade and climbs toward the neck.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit or stand comfortably with shoulders released. Raise your left arm straight out to the side to about shoulder height, palm facing down, and watch the shoulder cap: a hollow appears below and behind the bony tip of the shoulder — the acromion — while in front of that same shelf sits a second hollow, the address of Jianyu. Lay the pads of your right index and middle fingers into the rear hollow, the one behind the acromion’s outer end. Then lower the arm slowly. The dimple softens as the muscle relaxes across it, but the fingertip keeps its bearings in the gentle depression that remains; if the exact spot grows elusive, raise the arm again briefly to reconfirm, then settle back down. That spot, posterior to Jianyu, is Jianliao’s address.
Two confirmations help before any real pressing begins. First, compare sides with a feather-light touch: most people notice a faint, dull awareness at the true point, and little sensation a finger-width away. Second, invite the muscle to introduce itself — with the arm raised, rotate the forearm slowly as if turning an invisible doorknob, and feel the deltoid slide and bunch under still fingers; the point waits inside that moving landscape, in the hollow that never quite fills. Neither confirmation requires force. If raising the arm is uncomfortable for any reason, skip the lift entirely: find the pointed outer end of the acromion instead and explore just below and behind it, pressing gently until the familiar soft gap appears without any elevation at all.
Common slips are few and easy to correct. Drifting forward leaves you in the front hollow — worthy territory, but that is Jianyu’s address, not this point’s; the acromion between them makes a clean fence. Sliding too far down the arm takes you off the shoulder cap altogether, toward the neighbourhood of Naohui near the deltoid’s lower border. Searching through a thick sleeve mutes every landmark, so bare skin or a thin layer serves best. And pressing hard enough to bruise the muscle teaches nothing while blurring the very hollow you are hunting; the dimple shows itself to light fingers. When in doubt, return to the bony tip of the shoulder, take the arm out to the side once more, and begin again unhurried.
Reading the Name: Shoulder Hollow
The name is almost diagrammatic. Jian 肩 means shoulder — the character even sketches a shoulder with the body beneath it. Liao 髎 wears the bone radical on its left side and carries the sense of a hollow, crevice, or pore in bone — the kind of small gap a careful finger finds where bone meets bone or bone gives way to tendon. Set together, Jianliao reads plainly as the shoulder hollow: the place where the shoulder frame opens a little window. The character liao recurs across the body’s map wherever a bony opening marks a station — sacrum, face, shoulder girdle — and the same character even names Tianliao (TH15), the very next station up this channel, higher along the shoulder blade. Reading the name is reading a short terrain report.
Pinyin renders the name Jiānliáo, with a high, flat first tone on jian and a rising second tone on liao. The hanzi pair 肩髎 is compact enough to memorise at a glance. Point names built on architecture — gates, valleys, courtyards, storehouses, hollows — do real work rather than decorate: they tell the searching hand what to expect before it arrives. A hollow promises shelter for the fingertip and asks for gentleness in return; the hand that arrives expecting a ridge presses wrong twice. In this way the oldest labels in the tradition function as miniature field notes, passed along for centuries to whoever came looking with patient hands.
There is a quieter lesson folded into the name too. The point belongs only partly to stillness: its clearest landmark is conjured by movement, the arm swinging away from the body to open the dimple like a door eased on its hinges. Old teaching seems comfortable with that paradox — the station named for a hollow is best found in motion, and the complaint it traditionally served, a shoulder too heavy to lift, is motion lost. Between those two facts sits a small meditation: bodies reveal themselves in movement, and self-care begins by asking the body to show its own way in. Like many of the best point names, this one is a set of instructions written in two characters.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The recorded actions read: arm pain, heavy shoulder with inability to raise the arm, scapular pain, and hypochondriac pain. Take them in their era’s own language. Aching and stiffness anywhere along a limb belonged to the classical category of painful obstruction — qi and blood failing to move freely along their roads — and a point sitting directly on the troubled shoulder was the plainest kind of answer available: local attention for local congestion. The san jiao channel runs the length of the arm’s outer face, and discomfort along the route was traditionally met with points along the route, which is how Jianliao entered such discussions generation after generation.
The second indication repays slow reading. Heavy shoulder with inability to raise the arm gathers, in a single phrase, the experience of a shoulder gone leaden — an arm that swings stiffly at the side because lifting it feels like hoisting cargo. Classical writers read heaviness as qi and blood falling short or stagnating: the limb under-fed, under-drained, unwilling. There is a quiet symmetry in the record: the point is located by lifting the arm, yet tradition reached for it precisely in those moments when lifting had become the problem. Practically, that symmetry matters less than the honesty of the framing — these are descriptions of traditional reasoning about the body, documented for understanding, not claims that pressing this point restores movement.
The remaining indications ride outward and inward. Scapular pain belongs to the district: the rounded shoulder cap adjoins the shoulder blade, and stations around the great bony shelf traditionally served complaints across that whole neighbourhood. Hypochondriac pain reaches further — the flank below the ribs — and here the channel map supplies the bridge: classical texts describe the san jiao pathway sending an internal branch through the chest, where it connects with the pericardium and descends through the torso’s regions. Complaints in chest-and-flank territory were therefore read onto the channel, and points along its course entered the discussion. It bears repeating plainly: these are traditional uses recorded in a licensed dataset and classical literature, offered for cultural and historical understanding. 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.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point located by the walkthrough above, settle in: seated, spine tall but unforced, the working forearm resting on a table or cushion so the shoulder stays lazy. Curl your index and middle fingers together and lay the pads — never the tips — on the spot. Begin with contact alone for a few breaths, then add small, slow circles, letting the skin glide over the thick muscle beneath. Aim for a pleasant dullness, a mild spreading warmth — the honest ache of good pressure — never sharpness. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, matched where possible to long exhales so each circle rides the breath out. Swap hands and repeat on the other shoulder, keeping the sessions symmetrical; most shoulders prefer equal attention to a favourite single-sided ritual.
Quality matters more than duration. Light, patient, regularly repeated contact fits the wellness register this page practises; hard jabbing bruises the deltoid and teaches the body nothing. Warm cold hands before starting, because chilled muscle guards. Choose a quiet corner over a screen and let the minutes double as a pause in the day: inhale through the nose, feel the shoulder soften under still fingers, lean the pressure in gently as the breath leaves. People who keep a routine often anchor it to an existing habit — after morning stretching, or before bed — because consistency, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask for.
Treat the exercise as a small ceremony of attention rather than a treatment session. Across weeks, notice what changes: perhaps the shoulder rides looser through the afternoon, perhaps the tender spot grows quieter, perhaps nothing shifts except that you spend ninety seconds genuinely listening to your own shoulder. Every one of those outcomes fits the honest scope of self-acupressure. What does not fit is escalation — digging harder, lingering longer, or pressing through pain to force a result. When curiosity pulls that way, return to gentleness or simply stop for the day; the hollow has nowhere else to be.
Cautions and Safe Practice
This point arrives with unusually light paperwork. The licensed record carries no special caution for TH14 — no recorded prohibition comparable to the warnings some neighbouring points carry — and the reason is visible in the geography already described: thick muscle lies everywhere under the fingertip here, with no delicate cavity, no thin rib-gap, and no organ directly behind the skin. But the absence of a recorded caution is not an invitation to force; it is simply a clean bill of local anatomy. Self-care at this point still lives by the universal rules that govern every page in this collection, and those rules ask for a restraint the record does not need to spell out.
Practical rules follow. Use finger pads only — no elbows, knuckles, or tools — and keep every intention superficial, in skin and the outer layers of muscle. Skip the point entirely over broken, irritated, swollen, or freshly injured skin, and leave it aside during recovery from any shoulder injury, injection, or surgery until a clinician confirms ordinary activity is welcome again. A sudden sharp or electric streak, or any sensation radiating down the arm, means stop at once and do not try again that day; dull ache may be welcomed, electricity never. Pregnant readers, and anyone managing a chronic illness, taking regular medication, or living with a diagnosed shoulder condition, 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 care — not a longer pressing session — for shoulder pain following a fall or accident, a shoulder that looks deformed or swells suddenly, fever arriving alongside joint pain, numbness or weakness spreading into the hand, or arm discomfort coming together with chest pressure or breathlessness, which always belongs in emergency hands. Persistent symptoms belong with a licensed practitioner, medical or East Asian medical as suits the complaint. Jianliao’s oldest gift is modest and durable: a small hollow that teaches the hand patience and the mind attention, offered freely to anyone who slows down enough to look.
Jianliao, the Shoulder Hollow, sits deep in the rounded cap of the shoulder, just behind its neighbour Jianyu and revealed when the arm lifts away from the body. Classical practice reached for it when the arm ached, when the shoulder felt too heavy to raise, or when pain crossed the shoulder blade or side of the ribs. This guide walks through finding it by touch and pressing it gently at home.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How do I find Jianliao without knowing anything about cun?
- Let movement draw the map. Raise the arm out to the side and watch for the hollow that appears below and behind the bony tip of the shoulder; that dimple, standing behind Jianyu’s front hollow, is the location the dataset describes. Lower the arm, keep your fingertip in the softened depression, and confirm again with a brief lift whenever the spot blurs. Cun measurements only appear downstream of this point — describing Naohui’s distance below — so the shoulder station itself needs none.
- Is pressing Jianliao myself actually safe?
- For healthy adults, gentle fingertip pressure on this thickly padded stretch of shoulder is generally reasonable self-care: dense muscle and well-cushioned bone lie under the hand, far from the delicate structures that make some points demanding. The licensed record carries no special caution for the point. Respect the universal stop signals all the same: sharp, electric, or radiating sensation ends the session immediately, and nothing is ever pressed through pain.
- What did classical practice use Jianliao for?
- The traditional record lists arm pain, heavy shoulder with inability to raise the arm, scapular pain, and hypochondriac pain. Classical theory read them through the channel: a san jiao pathway climbing the outer arm and crossing the shoulder, with an internal branch reaching through the chest. Those are documented frameworks for understanding the body, offered for context — not evidence-backed treatment claims.
- The point is found by lifting the arm — but tradition used it when lifting was hard. Is that contradictory?
- It is a practical wrinkle, not a contradiction. The raised-arm hollow is simply the clearest landmark anatomy offers; once you know the address relative to the acromion, the point can be reached without any elevation — slide below and behind the bony tip and search gently for the gap. Tradition’s note about where a point shows itself best describes how to find it, not who may approach it afterwards.
- How is Jianliao different from Jianyu (LI15)?
- They are bookends flanking the acromion. Jianyu sits in the anteroinferior hollow in front of the bony shelf and belongs to the large intestine channel; Jianliao sits posterior to it, below and behind the same shelf, and belongs to the san jiao channel. Both reveal themselves on the same movement — abduction — and classical practice kept both in view for shoulder complaints, approaching the joint from either face of the great bony landmark.
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, channel pathway, and classical indication context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for TH14 Jianliao — 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/th14/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/th14/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/th14/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "TH14",
"name": {
"en": "Jianliao",
"gloss": "Shoulder Hollow",
"zh-Hant": "肩髎",
"zh-Hans": "肩髎"
},
"channel": {
"id": "TH",
"order": 14,
"of": 23
},
"location": {
"text": "Lift the arm out to the side: the hollow that appears behind and below the tip of the shoulder."
},
"for": [
"A heavy shoulder that will not lift",
"arm pain"
],
"press": {
"text": "Gentle finger pressure, about a minute each shoulder.",
"seconds": 60
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Tongren Shuxue Zhenjiu Tujing, book 4",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/th14",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}