The Eight Trigrams’ appointed hour: noon, ninth month, fifteenth day

It happened that in the autumn of the sixteenth year a comet appeared in the northwest. The Imperial Astronomical Bureau said that its portent pointed to war, and memorialized to move the intercalary eighth month of the eighteenth year to the second month of the following year. The rebels then fastened on this, taking it as an omen unfavourable to the intercalary eighth month; and because their scripture contained the words “two-eight, mid-autumn, yellow flowers fall to the ground”, they made their teaching all the more marvellous, saying that by the signs of the stars it fell on the fifteenth day of the ninth month at the hour of noon, and that, taking advantage of the emperor’s progress to Mulan, they would at that time seize the capital.