Metal 4 bureau (金四局)
The Metal 4 bureau (金四局) is one of five five-element bureaus, taken from the nayin of your Life Palace. It decides where Zi Wei sits, and it opens your ten-year luck cycles at age 4, so the decades run 4, 14, 24, 34 and onward.
What the bureau actually decides
The bureau's number combines with your lunar birth day to place Zi Wei, and the other thirteen major stars follow from that position. It then sets when each ten-year period begins - age 4 for Metal 4. Both jobs are mechanical, which is why the bureau has to be computed correctly before any interpretation is worth reading: a wrong bureau does not produce a slightly-off chart, it produces someone else's.
What Metal 4 does not mean
Metal here is not a description of character, and it is not the element of your birth year. It is the nayin of the Life Palace's stem-and-branch pair, used as a placement key. Charts on Metal 4 are no more decisive, rigid or money-minded than any other. Where a reading talks about temperament it is reading the stars in the Life Palace and its triangle, and those vary enormously within any one bureau.
Reading the timing
Metal 4 sits in the middle of the five, which in practice means its decade boundaries fall close to the round-number ages people intuitively expect, but never exactly on them. At 33 a Metal 4 chart is nine years into the decade that opened at 24 and about to change; the same age on Water 2 has already changed, and on Fire 6 has three years still to run. When a reading says a chapter is closing, this is the arithmetic behind it.
Frequently asked questions
Does Metal 4 mean I am suited to money or business?
No. That association comes from confusing the bureau with the metal element's popular meanings. The bureau is a placement and timing device. Financial tendencies in a chart are read from the Wealth Palace, its stars, and where the four transformations land.
Why do two people born on the same day get different bureaus?
Because the bureau follows the Life Palace, and the Life Palace depends on birth hour as well as date. Two people born on the same day at different hours can land on different bureaus, which shifts both their star placements and their decade timings.
How do I find my bureau?
Cast your chart. The bureau appears in the centre of the grid, with the decade range on each palace, so you can see the ages your own cycles run.
See where it sits in your own chart - free, no sign-up, about 30 seconds.
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