How to read a Zi Wei Dou Shu chart

A Zi Wei Dou Shu chart is a square of twelve boxes. Each box is a palace covering one area of life, each holds the stars that landed there, and one of them is your Life Palace. Read those three things and you can read most of a chart. Everything below walks through an actual chart rather than a diagram drawn for the occasion.

1. Find the Life Palace first

The Life Palace (命宮) is the one box that changes how you read every other box, so it is always the starting point. It is outlined above. Its position comes from your lunar birth month and your birth hour, so it is the part of the chart most sensitive to getting the time right.

In this chart the Life Palace holds Zi Wei and Qi Sha - the emperor star sitting with the general. Classically that pairing is read as authority that expresses itself through decisive action rather than through delegation, and the traditional phrase for it is turning killing into authority (化殺為權).

2. The twelve palaces are fixed in order, not in place

Going anticlockwise from the Life Palace you always get the same sequence: Siblings, Marriage, Children, Wealth, Health, Travel, Friends, Career, Property, Fortune, Parents. The order never changes. What changes from chart to chart is which box each one lands in, and therefore which stars it inherits.

So the question is never "what does the Wealth Palace mean" in the abstract. It is what happens when your Wealth Palace happens to hold the stars it does.

3. Read the major stars, then their brightness

Fourteen major stars carry most of the reading. Here the Wealth Palace (marked 3) holds Wu Qu and Tan Lang: the money star with the star of appetite and versatility, which is read as earning that comes through drive and opportunism rather than through a steady salary.

Each star also has a brightness, graded on the classical five-step scale - miao, wang, li, ping, xian (廟旺利平陷). The same star bright and dim are close to two different readings, so brightness is not a decoration on the star, it is part of it.

4. The four transformations are what make it your chart

This is the step most beginners skip and the one that separates a real reading from a list of star meanings. Your birth year's heavenly stem sends four transformations - 祿 prosperity, 權 authority, 科 reputation, 忌 obstruction - onto four specific stars.

This chart is a 庚 year, so 祿 goes to Tai Yang, 權 to Wu Qu, 科 to Tai Yin and 忌 to Tian Tong. Follow where those stars sit and you have the chart's pressure map: 權 lands in the Wealth Palace, and both 科 and 忌 land together in the Health Palace (marked 4). A doubled-up palace like that is where a practitioner would spend most of the reading.

The 忌 star is the single most useful thing to locate in any chart. It marks where effort meets resistance, and it is the one placement that tends to describe something the person already recognises.

5. The numbers in the corners are the decades

Each palace also governs a ten-year period, shown in the bottom corner of every cell. They run in sequence from the Life Palace, and which palace governs your current decade tells you which area of life the chapter is about. The starting age comes from the five-element bureau, which is why this chart's decades begin at 5 - Earth-Five (土五局).

Where to go next

The fastest way to learn this is on your own chart rather than someone else's. Cast one, then tap any star or palace name on the grid to read what it means in that position. If you want the arithmetic behind the placements instead, the method page shows a worked example you can check by hand, and names the conventions this engine follows.

Frequently asked questions