Zigong

What is CV19?

CV19, or Zigong (Purple Palace), is a point on the midline of the breastbone, level with the second gap between the ribs.

It belongs to the Conception Vessel, the channel that runs up the front midline of the body from the pubic bone to the lower lip. CV19 is one of a ladder of points spaced down the sternum (CV17 through CV21), and classical texts group them together for complaints of the chest and throat.

In traditional use, Zigong was reached for when the chest felt tight, blocked or full: cough, wheeze, chest discomfort, and food that seemed not to go down easily. Its name, Purple Palace, is one of a set of imperial names given to the sternal points, reflecting their position over the heart rather than any tested function.

Two things are worth saying once, clearly, before the rest of the page. First, a point having two thousand years of use behind it is not evidence that it works; tradition records what practitioners did, not what happened in a controlled comparison. Second, tradition is not evidence that a point is safe either, because the people who wrote these texts were not thinking about healed sternotomy scars, pacemakers or thinning bone.

The honest verdict on the evidence: there is essentially no human research testing CV19 on its own for anything. Where chest-area acupuncture or acupressure has been studied, CV19 usually appears, if at all, as one point inside a larger prescription, so nothing can be credited to it specifically. That is different from saying it does nothing; it means nobody has looked properly.

Everything described here is self-applied finger pressure on the skin over the breastbone. Light pressure on an intact, healthy sternum is a low-risk thing to try for general chest tension, provided you are not using it in place of care for a symptom that needs a doctor. Chest symptoms are the one area where that caveat really matters.

Where is CV19 and how do you find it?

CV19 sits on the centre line of the breastbone, level with the second gap between the ribs, a little below the ridge near the top of the sternum.

• Start at the throat hollow. Put a fingertip in the soft dip at the base of your throat, between the two collarbones. That dip is the suprasternal notch, and the flat bone below it is your sternum (breastbone).
• Slide down to the ridge. Run your finger straight down the bone. About 5 cm (2 inches) down, most people can feel a slight horizontal ridge or step where the top section of the breastbone meets the main body. Anatomists call this the sternal angle.
• Find the second rib. The second rib joins the sternum right at that ridge. Walk your finger sideways a centimetre or so and you can usually feel the firm rib, then the softer gap just below it.
• Come back to the midline. Drop about one thumb-width (roughly 1.5–2 cm) below the ridge and return to the exact centre line of the bone. That spot, level with the second gap between the ribs, is CV19.
• Check what you are on. CV19 is on bone, not in a soft gap. If your finger has sunk into a hollow, you have drifted off the midline onto the space between ribs, or down toward CV18 or CV17.

In classical measurement, CV19 is given as about 1.6 cun below CV20 on the midline, which for most adults is roughly 3–4 cm. Counting in cun is less reliable on yourself than using the ridge, so trust the bony landmark.

The area will feel firm and may be mildly tender to press. That is normal over the breastbone and is not a sign you have found something significant.

How do you apply pressure to CV19?

1. Sit upright and settled. Sit in a chair with your back supported and your shoulders dropped. Slumping makes the chest landmarks harder to feel and the pressure harder to control.
2. Use a finger pad, not a nail. Place the flat pad of your index or middle finger on the point. A thumb works too, but the pad of a finger gives you finer control over a bony surface.
3. Press straight in, gently. Push perpendicular to the bone with light to moderate pressure. On a target this bony, that means roughly the force you would use to press a doorbell, no more. You should feel firm contact and perhaps mild tenderness, never a sharp or bruising pain.
4. Hold and breathe. Keep steady pressure for 30 to 60 seconds while breathing slowly through your nose. Some people prefer small circles instead of a static hold; either is fine, and neither is better supported than the other.
5. Release slowly. Ease off over a couple of seconds and rest for half a minute. Repeat two or three times if you want, for a total of about three to five minutes.
6. Repeat sparingly. Once or twice a day is plenty. The skin over the breastbone is thin and daily heavy pressure can leave it sore for days.

Stop immediately if: the pressure causes sharp pain, the pain spreads into your jaw, neck, back or arm, you become short of breath or lightheaded, or the skin bruises or reddens unusually. Also stop if you feel a lump, step or grinding under your finger that you have not noticed before, and get that checked.

This is finger pressure only. Nothing on this page involves needles, skin heating, suction or anything that breaks the skin, and self-applied chest work should never involve any of those.

What is CV19 traditionally used for?

• Cough and wheeze. Classical sources list Zigong for cough and laboured breathing, alongside its neighbours on the sternum. No trial has tested finger pressure on CV19 for cough or asthma, so this remains a traditional claim only. It must never replace an inhaler or prescribed treatment.
• Chest fullness and tightness. The most commonly repeated indication is a sense of the chest being blocked, stuffed or constricted. Many people find firm pressure on the breastbone subjectively calming, which may be plain comfort and slowed breathing rather than anything channel-specific. That effect has not been measured for this point.
• Difficulty swallowing or food feeling stuck. Texts mention Zigong for the sensation of food not passing down, sometimes called plum-stone throat. There is no human evidence here at all, and persistent swallowing difficulty is a symptom that needs medical assessment rather than self-treatment.
• Vomiting and reflux-type complaints. Some sources extend the chest points to nausea and bringing food back up. The decent nausea evidence in acupressure belongs to PC6 on the forearm, which has been tested in many controlled trials; none of that evidence transfers to CV19.
• Emotional tightness in the chest. A modern, popular use is pressing the sternum when anxious or grief-struck. This is not strongly rooted in the classical indications for CV19 specifically, and what research exists on acupressure for anxiety uses other points and small, unblinded designs.

Taken together, CV19 is a point with a consistent traditional role and almost no direct human testing. If you try it, treat it as a low-cost comfort measure for a mild, familiar symptom, and judge it by whether it actually helps you over a week or two.

Are there tips for using CV19 effectively?

• Find it before you need it. Locate the sternal ridge once, calmly, while nothing is wrong. Hunting for landmarks while your chest already feels tight is frustrating and tends to make you press too hard.
• Let the breath do the work. Pair the hold with a slow out-breath that is longer than the in-breath. Slow exhaling has its own calming effect on the body, and it is probably the most reliable part of what you are doing.
• Keep the pressure honest. More force is not more effect on a bony point. If you are leaving a red mark or feeling sore the next day, you have overdone it.
• Use a mirror the first few times. It is surprisingly easy to drift off the midline onto a rib. Checking visually for a session or two builds the habit of staying on the centre of the bone.
• Keep it short and repeatable. Three to five minutes, once or twice a day, is more useful than one long session. Short and regular is also easier to judge over time.
• Write down what happened. Note the symptom, the score out of ten before and after, and the date. Two weeks of notes will tell you far more about whether this helps you than any general claim about the point.
• Pick one change at a time. If you start acupressure, a new supplement and a breathing app in the same week, you will never know which one mattered.
• Mind the clothing and skin. Press on bare skin or a thin layer, and skip it entirely if there is a rash, sunburn, a healing scar or anything tender in the area.
• Know when it is the wrong tool. If the symptom is new, worsening, or comes with breathlessness, treat that as a reason to call a doctor rather than a reason to press harder.

What do people get wrong with CV19?

• Confusing two points called Zigong. This is the big one. CV19 Zigong (Purple Palace) is on the breastbone. There is a completely separate extra point also written Zigong (Uterus) low on the abdomen, used in fertility and period contexts. Video captions mix them up constantly. If the instruction involves the lower belly, it is not CV19.
• Counting the ribs wrong. Dropping too far down the sternum lands you on CV18 or CV17 instead. Use the sternal ridge as your anchor rather than trying to count ribs from the collarbone.
• Pressing into a gap. CV19 is on the flat of the bone. If your fingertip sinks into a soft space, you have slipped sideways between ribs, and digging there is uncomfortable and pointless.
• Grinding too hard on bone. The lining of the breastbone bruises easily and stays sore. Heavy knuckle or tool pressure on the sternum is a common cause of days of tenderness that people then mistake for a problem.
• Expecting a cure. No acupressure point cures asthma, reflux or a swallowing problem, and CV19 has no trial evidence behind it at all. Going in expecting a fix sets you up to either be disappointed or to keep pressing instead of getting assessed.
• Using it during an asthma attack. Reach for your reliever inhaler and follow your action plan. Pressing your chest instead wastes minutes that matter.
• Treating chest pain with massage. New, severe or spreading chest pain is a medical emergency until proven otherwise. Rubbing the breastbone is never the right first response.
• Pressing over hardware or a scar. People forget what sits under the skin there, including sternal wires, ports and pacemaker leads. Check before you press.

What does the research on CV19 actually say?

There is no useful human research on CV19 specifically. A search of the clinical literature turns up no controlled trial, and no credible single-group study, that tests finger pressure on CV19 for cough, chest tightness, swallowing difficulty or anything else. Naming a study here would mean inventing one, and this page will not do that.

Where sternal points appear in research at all, they appear inside multi-point treatments. A protocol for breathlessness or anxiety might include several Conception Vessel points along with points on the limbs, and most such studies use needling rather than finger pressure. Even when those studies report a benefit, the design makes it impossible to attribute anything to CV19 on its own. Pooled protocols cannot tell you what one point contributed.

It also helps to know what strong evidence looks like in this field, so you can see the gap. PC6 on the inner forearm has been tested in many randomised controlled trials for nausea and vomiting, including after surgery and in pregnancy, and the overall picture there is genuinely supportive, if modest. That is the clearest case in the whole acupressure literature. CV19 has nothing remotely comparable.

The broader acupressure evidence base has well-known limits. Most trials are small, run for only a few weeks, and cannot blind participants to whether they were pressed. Outcomes are usually self-reported scores, which are the kind most sensitive to expectation. Sham controls are hard to design, because any touch is still touch. These problems affect well-studied points; for an unstudied point like CV19 they are beside the point entirely.

What this means in practice is simple. You may press CV19 gently and find it comforting, and that experience is real for you. But nobody can tell you it outperforms simply resting your hand on your chest and breathing slowly, because that comparison has not been made.