A cylinder of one hundred numbered bamboo sticks. The seeker shakes it until one stick rises above the rest, and that number draws a poem: four lines, a fortune grade, and a story from the old histories. One question. One poem. One verdict, graded from supreme to difficult. That is the whole machine, and it has worked for eight centuries.
The poem-set this tool will carry is the oldest of its kind: the Tianzhu Ling Qian, born at the Upper Tianzhu temple in Hangzhou under the Song dynasty, carried to Japan in the Kamakura era, and still shaking every day at Sensō-ji in Tokyo.
Status, honestly: the cylinder is being carved, and the hundred poems are being translated from the earliest sources. This altar opens soon. Until then, the sibling Chinese oracle is live on this site: the I Ching, and the Chinese divination tradition is surveyed in Fire, Shell, and Stalk.