A point location reference is a text that says where on the body each acupuncture point lies, in words, measurements and drawings. Two such texts are written as standards: the WHO Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region, published by the WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific in 2008 and reprinted with updates in 2009, and China’s national standard GB/T 12346-2021, Nomenclature and location of meridian points. Textbooks sit beside them, and the two standards drew on the same literature and on each other. This page sets out how the standards were made, the six points where they record more than one location, and what studies found when trained people marked the same point.
What is the best acupuncture point reference for practitioners?
No standards body or study among the sources here names a single best reference. The documents written as standards are WHO’s 2008 Standard Acupuncture Point Locations, covering 361 points, and China’s GB/T 12346-2021, covering 362. Each states its own scope in similar terms: the WHO standard says it applies to teaching, research, clinical service, publication and academic exchange, and GB/T 12346-2021 lists teaching, research, medical practice, publishing and academic exchange.
Textbooks predate the standards or draw on them. Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji and Kevin Baker’s A Manual of Acupuncture, a 670-page book from Journal of Chinese Medicine Publications, is one of 34 works in the WHO standard’s reference list, in its 1998 edition; the list also includes China’s 1990 national standard and Japanese and Korean point texts. For research, Sabina Lim of Kyung Hee University, writing in eCAM in 2010, reported that a number of acupuncture journals would ask papers to follow the WHO standard in their instructions to authors.
How the WHO standard was made
The WHO standard’s foreword gives the reason for it: member states disagreed about roughly a quarter of the regular point locations. The Regional Office convened the first informal consultation in Manila in October 2003, with experts from China, Japan and the Republic of Korea, and 10 further meetings followed, held in Beijing, Kyoto, Daejeon, Osaka, Tokyo and Tsukuba; the foreword says the work took three years. The experts combined analysis of the classical and modern literature with clinical experience and measurement. Where an old text is unclear, the standard gives priority to texts of a ‘national standard’ nature, such as the Zhenjiu Jiayi Jing and the Tongren Shuxue Zhenjiu Tujing, and four rules for reading them, set out in Measuring in cun.
Of the 361 points, 92 were treated as controversial. The meeting minutes in the standard’s annex record them being worked through in stages, with 80 confirmed by the first task force meeting in Beijing in February 2005. In the end 86 were agreed. Lim’s account counts 355 points standardised and six left as “controversial acupoints”, for which the standard records a tentative location and an alternative.
The six points with two locations
The table sets the WHO location and its alternative beside the location GB/T 12346-2021 gives. The Chinese standard takes the WHO alternative for GV26 (Shuigou) and LI19 (Kouheliao), which it places 0.5 cun lateral to GV26, and the WHO location for the other four.
| Point | WHO location | WHO alternative | GB/T 12346-2021 |
|---|---|---|---|
GV26 Shuigou | Midpoint of the philtrum midline | Junction of the upper third and lower two thirds of the philtrum | Junction of the upper and middle thirds of the philtrum, the WHO alternative |
LI19 Kouheliao | Below the outer margin of the nostril, level with the midpoint of the philtrum | Level with the junction of the upper third and lower two thirds of the philtrum | The WHO alternative |
LI20 Yingxiang | In the nasolabial groove, level with the midpoint of the outer border of the nostril wing | Level with the lower border of the nostril wing | The WHO location |
PC08 Laogong | Between the 2nd and 3rd metacarpal bones, proximal to the knuckles | Between the 3rd and 4th metacarpal bones | The WHO location, nearer the 3rd bone; notes the alternative |
PC09 Zhongchong | Centre of the tip of the middle finger | 0.1 F-cun from the corner of the nail on the thumb side | The WHO location; notes the alternative |
GB30 Huantiao | One third of the way from the greater trochanter to the sacral hiatus | One third of the way from the greater trochanter to the front point of the hip bone | The WHO location; no alternative |
How GB/T 12346-2021 relates to the WHO standard
China first issued the standard as GB 12346-1990, which the WHO standard cites, and revised it in 2006 and again in 2021. The 2021 edition was drafted at the Institute of Acupuncture and Moxibustion of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. Its introduction says the revision was made partly to harmonise with the WHO standard, and its foreword lists the changes: the anatomical region wording of all 362 locations now matches the 2009 reprint of the WHO standard; three points, LI14 (Binao), TB13 (Naohui) and GB31 (Fengshi), were reworded; and nine gained notes on how to find them. Point names follow WHO’s 1991 nomenclature. The WHO standard lists Professor Huang Longxiang as China’s adviser at its first task force meeting, in Beijing in February 2005, and Huang Longxiang is one of the five principal drafters listed for GB/T 12346-2021.
The count differs by one because the 2021 edition moved Yintang, between the eyebrows, onto the Governing vessel between GV24 and GV25 and numbered it GV24+. The WHO standard keeps Yintang among the extra points. The same revision removed 46 extra points from the standard, to be published in a national standard of their own. Changes to the proportional measurements are covered in Measuring in cun. Wu Xiaodong, Huang Longxiang and Zhao Jingsheng, three of the drafters, explain the revision’s basis point by point in a 2022 paper in Zhongguo Zhen Jiu.
How closely practitioners agree
A text fixes one location; studies that asked people to mark it found a spread. In a 2012 study by Molsberger and colleagues, 71 doctors with acupuncture training marked 23 points on one man, and the area holding 95% of their marks ran from 2.7 cm² for PC06 to 41.4 cm² for ST38. A 2012 survey by Bäumler and colleagues asked attendees of an international medical acupuncture congress, and lecturers and students of the German Medical Society of Acupuncture, to mark LI10 and TH5 (TB05 here) on one research assistant’s arm. The 95% ellipses ranged from 5.18 to 44.49 cm², the two marks furthest apart for LI10 were 8.45 cm apart, and the only factor linked to the spread was having trained at the same school.
Tools narrowed it in one study. Choi and Chae in 2019 asked 22 fourth-year students at Kyung Hee University to mark PC05 by the WHO standard, once by eye and once with a laser that divides the distance between two landmarks into equal parts; the laser marks spread less along the length of the forearm and no differently across it. The 2019 systematic review by Godson and Wardle included 14 studies, nine of them on locating points, and found considerable variation among qualified medical acupuncturists and no study of qualified acupuncturists without a medical degree. A 2026 commentary by Yoon and colleagues proposes recording a point as a probability map built from many people’s marks rather than as one coordinate. What these spreads mean for choosing sham points in a trial is taken up in Sham acupuncture.
Reading a location on AcuiQ
Each AcuiQ point page carries a written location from the catalogue and a diagram, and the location names no source. On the six points above, the catalogue’s wording follows the Chinese standard: the GV26 page reads “at the junction of the upper ⅓ and middle ⅓ of the philtrum”, the WHO alternative, and the LI19 page places that point level with GV26; PC08, PC09, LI20 and GB30 match the WHO location. The classical point groups on the pages, such as the spring and well points, are sourced to Deadman, Al-Khafaji and Baker.
The catalogue’s codes are not always the WHO’s: it writes KD, LV and TB where WHO writes KI, LR and TE, and files Yintang as XH03, which is EX-HN3 to WHO and GV24+ to GB/T 12346-2021. A point page opens from the WHO form of a code as well, and the full mapping is in Reading a point code. A reader comparing a paper’s point with a catalogue location needs to know which standard the paper used; the WHO standard asks for multi-centre research to settle the six points it left open.