液門 Yemen
“Fluid Gate” · TH2
Hand Shaoyang · 2 of 23 · ying-spring
Where. On the back of the hand, at the edge of the web between the ring and little fingers.
For. Headache; ringing ears; sore throat.
Press. Gentle finger pressure, about a minute each hand.
腋門者，水也。在小指次指間陷者中按 · Press with me
Six slow breaths
About a minute. Press as you breathe out, ease as you breathe in.
鄰 · Neighbouring leaves
Where Yemen Sits on the Back of the Hand
The dataset locates Yemen on the dorsum of the hand, between the fourth and fifth fingers, at the junction of the red and white skin posterior to the web margin. Every phrase repays unpacking. The dorsum is simply the back of the hand, opposite the palm. Fourth and fifth sound like arithmetic until translated: the fourth finger is the ring finger, the fifth is the little finger, and the point lives in the valley where those two meet. The web margin is the fold where the loose skin bridging their bases creases when the fingers sit together. Posterior, in the vocabulary of point location, means toward the wrist — so the sought spot lies a few millimetres behind that fold, back on the open hand, not down between the fingertips where the web is softest.
The junction of the red and white skin deserves its own introduction, because it is one of the tradition’s favourite rulers. Along the fingers and hand, the palmar skin — paler, hairless, creased for gripping — hands over to the finer, often darker skin of the back of the hand, and the boundary draws a visible line wherever the two meet. Behind the ring–little web the line crosses soft, busy ground: the tendons that straighten the last two fingers fan across this stretch, and between them the tissue yields enough to leave a genuine dip under a resting fingertip. The skin here is thin and the bones close beneath, which is exactly why lightness is the whole art at this address.
Neighbours give the surest orientation. Down at the ring finger’s far corner, beside the nail on the side facing the little finger, sits Guanchong (TH1), the channel’s first point and its classical well. Back up the hand, in the hollow immediately behind the fourth knuckle, between the two long bones, lies Zhongzhu (TH3), the stream point. Farther still, on the dorsal wrist crease, Yangchi (TH4) waits. Yemen owns the narrow strip between the first two landmarks: the ground just behind the ring–little web, on the colour boundary. Which side of that fold your fingertip finally rests on decides whether you have arrived or merely nearly arrived — the difference here is millimetres, and the fold itself is the fence between them.
A Self-Palpation Walkthrough
Sit comfortably and lay the back of your left hand on a table or thigh, fingers loosely curled into a half fist. The curl matters more than it looks: bending the fingers raises and firms the web between ring finger and little finger, turning a vague stretch of skin into readable landscape. With your right thumb or index finger, find the crease where the bases of the last two fingers fold together. Then slide your pad a few millimetres toward the wrist, off the fold and onto the colour boundary where palm-toned skin gives way to the back-of-hand kind, and let the pad settle into the faint dip it finds there. Flex the fingers slowly a few times under feather-light contact: a true hollow answers with a subtle shifting fullness. Repeat the entire search on the other hand.
Two quiet checks help before any real pressure begins. The comparison test: touch feather-light at the spot and then a finger-width away — most people notice a faint, dull awareness at the true point and little sensation beside it. The landmark test: the spot keeps its position behind the fold while the fingers move; if your fingertip has slipped into the crease itself, it has travelled too far toward the fingertips, into skin too thin and tender for pressing. A sight check finishes the job: with the fingers loosely spread, the candidate spot should sit level with the upper edge of the web, clearly on the back of the hand rather than curling round toward the palm.
The classic slips are three. Arriving too far forward lands in the tender fold of the web, where the skin bruises easily and no point waits. Drifting too far back up the hand wanders onto Zhongzhu’s ground behind the knuckle — a fine point in its own right, but not the one you went looking for. Sliding sideways sets the pad on a tendon ridge instead of the softer hollow between tendon strands. When in doubt, reset with a small litany: half fist, find the fold, step back a few millimetres, trace the colour line, wait for the dip. The channel’s own counting supports the search — nail corner first, web-margin spring second, knuckle-hollow stream third.
Reading the Name: Fluid Gate
The name compresses a whole chapter of classical physiology into two characters. Ye 液 means fluid — the liquids of the body, gathered in the classical term jin-ye: the moisture and nourishment that wet the joints, moisten the senses, and keep tissues supple. Men 門 is a gate or door, the same character that closes so many point names along the channels. Read together, Yemen is the Fluid Gate: a doorway through which the body’s waters pass. Spoken aloud the name is Yèmén, a falling fourth tone on ye and a rising second tone on men — two syllables, one image, easy to hold in memory once the picture is in place.
Classical commentators, working centuries apart, read the name in two compatible ways. The terrain reading is the simplest: the little hollow behind the web is a pocket where moisture seems to gather, a low place where the flow pools before passing on. The functional reading ties the name to the point’s official class: on the classical map, a channel’s current leaves the fingertip well barely moving, and at the second station — the spring — it first takes on the quality of flowing liquid, mobile and alive. A gate standing where water begins to move is a fitting emblem for that stage, and the dataset this site licenses preserves both readings without forcing a choice between them.
There is a quieter pleasure here too. Channels name their points for gates, valleys, courtyards, pools, and storehouses, and the metaphors are never idle decoration — each one doubles as an instruction. A gate says: stand here, where the passage narrows and the traffic slows. It tells the searching fingertip where to stop and the curious mind how the tradition pictured the body: as landscapes with doors set into them. Yemen’s name is therefore both address and manual, and the water theme it opens continues directly into the point’s formal title, examined next.
A Spring Point on the Fire Channel
Beyond its ordinal place, Yemen carries a formal office in classical theory: it is the ying-spring point of the San Jiao channel. The five transport points arrange the first five locations of every channel into an ascending landscape borrowed from water: well, spring, stream, river, and sea. Qi, in the traditional picture, behaves like water along this route — emerging scarcely at all at the fingertip wells, first stirring and taking liquid form at the springs, broadening at the streams, gathering pace at the rivers, and pooling wide at the seas near elbow and knee. Yemen’s recorded category, ying-spring, sets it at the moment the current first truly flows.
Tradition attached a temperament to each station. Generalised classical teaching, preserved in the commentarial literature, reached for spring points when heat complaints dominated a picture — the springs were the stops associated with fevers, flushed faces, and inflamed surfaces. That association matters twice over here. First, it explains the shape of Yemen’s own record, which leans heavily toward heat entries, as the indications section shows. Second, it completes a circle of imagery: the registry files the San Jiao channel among the fire phase, while the five-phase assignments give the spring points of the yang channels the water phase. A water-named station carrying water’s class on a fire channel — name, category, and element agreeing — is the tradition’s symbolic reasoning working with unusual neatness.
The wider channel context frames everything. The registry describes the San Jiao channel running from the ring finger up the outer arm to the temple, and classical course accounts have it surfacing exactly here, between the ring and little fingers, before climbing past the wrist, up the forearm, and onward toward the shoulder, the ear’s neighbourhood, and the temple region. Of the channel’s twenty-three points, Yemen stands second. In the interior–exterior scheme the channel also partners with the pericardium channel, whose line walks the forearm’s inner aspect — two routes facing each other across the arm. None of this is anatomy; all of it is the old cartography within which the point’s record was written, and it repays keeping in view.
Traditional Indications, Explained
The licensed record lists eight indications: headache, red eyes, tinnitus, deafness, sore throat, febrile disease, malaria, and arm pain. Laid out plainly, that is a striking portfolio for a spot the size of a lentil. Read inside the tradition, however, every entry has its seat. The framing throughout this section is deliberately conservative: these are the things classical practice reached for at this point, recorded in a licensed dataset and old literature — statements about historical usage, not promises about results.
The head and sense-organ entries ride the channel map. Classical course descriptions carry the San Jiao channel up the outer arm, around the ear’s neighbourhood, and into the temple region, so the hand-end of the line was treated as a live wire running to the face — hence headache, red eyes, tinnitus, and deafness gathering at a point beside a finger web. That is correspondence thinking, the era’s own physiology, not a claim about nerves or anatomy. The heat entries — febrile disease, sore throat, and red eyes again — fit the spring-point temperament discussed above, the classical habit of reaching for springs when heat dominated. Arm pain obeys the plainest rule of all: the nearest good point serves the nearest complaint.
Honesty asks that the remaining entries be handled squarely. Malaria startles modern eyes, and rightly: old records grouped under this heading a pattern of recurring chills and fevers whose cause they could not see. Today the word names a parasitic infection belonging to medical diagnosis and drug treatment; no pressure routine has any role in preventing or managing it, and any fever is first a reason to seek assessment, not a reason to press a point. With that said plainly, the rest of the hedge follows: these are traditional uses, offered for cultural and historical understanding, not claims that pressing Yemen treats disease. Where modern research has looked at self-applied pressure at all, reviews suggest effects are modest and context-dependent, and evidence tied to any single point remains thin. Red-flag routing for the sharper entries appears in the safety section below.
Self-Care Acupressure at Home
With the point confirmed by the walkthrough above, set up gently. Sit upright, rest the back of the hand on your leg, and let the fingers curl easily. Place the pad of your opposite thumb — pads always, never tips, nails, or tools — on the hollow and simply rest it there through three slow breaths. Then begin small, slow circles, letting the skin glide over the tissue beneath rather than grinding against tendon or bone. Pressure should register as pleasant dullness or faint warmth, nothing sharper. A common home rhythm is one to three minutes per side, once or twice daily, timed where possible to unhurried exhales. Finish by repeating everything on the other hand, keeping the sessions symmetrical.
Hand points tempt people toward too much force. The skin is thin, the bone near, and a thumb naturally leans hard on such compact ground — so decide in advance to press lighter than feels decisive. Warm cold hands first, because chilled tissue guards itself. Choose a quiet corner over a screen and let the practice double as a breathing pause: contact settling on the inhale, gentle circling on the long way out. People who keep such routines attach them to existing habits — coffee brewing, an afternoon stretch — because regularity, not intensity, is what self-care traditions actually ask.
Keep expectations sized to the practice. Across a week or two you may notice the area feeling less guarded, or simply enjoy ninety seconds of attended stillness in a busy day; both outcomes sit inside acupressure’s honest scope. Outside it lies escalation — pressing harder, longer, or deeper to force a result, especially over ground this thin-boned. Soreness lingering after a session is feedback, and the right response is less, not more. When curiosity pulls toward force, take that as the cue to soften, or to close the day’s practice altogether.
Cautions and Safe Practice
Reassuring geography comes first. Beneath this spot lie skin, the flat tendons that extend the last two fingers, small muscles between the knuckle bones, and the fine nerves and vessels of the hand’s edge — no organs, no body cavities. The licensed dataset records no specific cautions for Yemen, and this page echoes that empty record faithfully, as the contract requires. An absence of recorded cautions is not an invitation to enthusiasm, though. Hands meet the world constantly, the skin here is thin, and a conservative margin costs nothing while buying peace of mind.
Practical limits follow from the terrain. Skip the point whenever the skin nearby is broken or inflamed — cuts, hangnails, bites, eczema flares in the web. Set the practice aside after recent injury to that hand: sprains, jammed fingers, fractures still healing, tendon trouble, or an arthritis flare around the knuckles. Redness, warmth, or swelling calls for assessment rather than compression. Sharp, electric, or radiating sensation ends the session immediately, for the rest of that day. Anyone pregnant, and anyone managing chronic illness or taking blood-thinning medication, does well to consult a qualified practitioner before adding any new point practice at all.
And the frame around everything: this page is educational, and acupressure is comfort self-care — not diagnosis, not treatment, and never a substitute for the professionals whose work is precisely the symptom you may be hoping to quiet. Among the recorded indications several carry sharp modern edges. Any fever belongs with medical assessment first. A red, painful eye — especially with vision change or injury — belongs in prompt professional care. Sore throat with difficulty swallowing or breathing, a muffled voice, drooling, spreading neck swelling, or high fever is an emergency. The sudden worst headache of one’s life, or headache with fever and stiff neck, likewise. Persistent symptoms of any kind belong with a licensed practitioner, medical or East Asian medical as suits the complaint.
Yemen, the Fluid Gate, waits on the back of the hand in the web between the ring finger and the little finger, just behind the fold where their skin meets. Second point of the San Jiao channel, classical practice reached for it amid headache, red eyes, and ringing ears. This guide walks through finding it by touch and pressing it gently at home.
Self-care limits
Frequently asked
- How is Yemen different from its neighbours Guanchong (TH1) and Zhongzhu (TH3)?
- They are three stations on one short stretch of hand. Guanchong holds the well post at the ring finger’s nail corner; Yemen holds the spring post just behind the ring–little web; Zhongzhu holds the stream post behind the fourth knuckle. Their classical records overlap heavily — head and heat entries appear for all three — but each occupies distinct ground. Locating Yemen correctly means stopping behind the web fold, not wandering to either neighbour.
- Why would a point at the finger web carry ear and eye indications?
- Channel logic. Classical course descriptions bring the San Jiao channel up the outer arm to the head, threading past the ear toward the temple, so the hand stretch was treated as a live wire to those territories. Tinnitus and red eyes appearing at a hand point express that correspondence framework — presented here for understanding the record, not as anatomical discovery and not as a claim about outcomes.
- The record mentions malaria. Should I press Yemen for a fever?
- No. Treat any fever as a reason for medical assessment first, promptly where the person is very young, very old, pregnant, or unwell in other ways. The old entry reflects an earlier era’s habit of grouping recurring chill-and-fever patterns under one heading; modern malaria is an infection for medical diagnosis and drug treatment. Acupressure neither prevents nor manages it, and this page does not suggest otherwise.
- Is Yemen safe to press myself?
- For healthy adults, gentle fingertip contact held on the surface is generally reasonable self-care: nothing vital lies beneath, and the licensed dataset records no specific cautions for this point. Keep pressure light, stay off broken or inflamed skin, set the practice aside after recent hand injury, and respect the stop signals — sharpness, electricity, radiation — which end the session for the rest of the day.
- How soon should I expect to feel something?
- Expect little and stay patient. A faint dull awareness at the point is the commonest immediate notice; warmth spreading into the fingers comes for some and not others, and none of it predicts outcomes. If symptom relief is the goal and a reasonable trial changes nothing, take that as information and bring it to a licensed practitioner. The steadier returns — a daily pause, hands attended to — arrive regardless.
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, spring-point theory, and channel context.
- 03aijiu-mpvue (MIT License) licensed dataset, entry for TH2 Yemen — location, point class, actions, and the (empty) 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/th2/leaf.json
- GET /zh-hant/points/th2/leaf.json
- GET /zh-cn/points/th2/leaf.json
- /llms.txt — the index of every leaf
- JSON-LD in the page: MedicalWebPage, MedicalEntity and FAQPage
{
"id": "TH2",
"name": {
"en": "Yemen",
"gloss": "Fluid Gate",
"zh-Hant": "液門",
"zh-Hans": "液门"
},
"channel": {
"id": "TH",
"order": 2,
"of": 23
},
"location": {
"text": "On the back of the hand, at the edge of the web between the ring and little fingers."
},
"for": [
"headache",
"ringing ears",
"sore throat"
],
"press": {
"text": "Gentle finger pressure, about a minute each hand.",
"seconds": 60,
"sides": "both"
},
"cautions": [],
"source": "Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing, book 3",
"url": "https://acupoints.com/en/points/th2",
"lastReviewed": "2026-08-24"
}