Qi Zheng Si Yu (七政四余): the Chinese astrology that uses real planets
BaZi and Zi Wei never look at the sky. Qi Zheng Si Yu does: the Sun, Moon and five planets in the 28 lunar mansions, plus four calculated points. The Chinese cousin of the horoscope, and where it came from.
6 min read · Published 6 September 2026
The answer
Qi Zheng Si Yu (七政四余), the Seven Governors and Four Remainders, is the branch of Chinese astrology that reads a birth chart from the real positions of the Sun, Moon and five visible planets (the seven governors) together with four calculated points (the four remainders: Rahu and Ketu, the lunar nodes, plus Yuebei and Ziqi). Positions are placed against the 28 lunar mansions and twelve palaces. It took shape in the Tang dynasty under the influence of Indian and, through it, Hellenistic astrology, and it is the one Chinese system that works like a Western or Vedic horoscope: from the sky, not from the calendar. AsterNym computes the planets and the nodes; it does not compute Qi Zheng Si Yu itself.
The system most people do not know China has
Ask what Chinese astrology is and the answers are the zodiac animals, BaZi and Zi Wei Dou Shu. None of those looks at the sky. BaZi is built from the calendar's stems and branches; Zi Wei places symbolic stars by arithmetic on the lunar date. They are metaphysical systems that use astronomical vocabulary. Qi Zheng Si Yu is different in kind: it starts from where the planets were, which makes it the Chinese member of the same family as the Western natal chart and the Vedic chart.
It was once the astrology of the court and the almanac. It declined sharply after the Qing, survived in fragments and in Korea and Japan, and has been revived in the last few decades by practitioners working from the old texts with modern ephemerides.
Seven governors, four remainders
The eleven bodies of a chart
- 七政 qī zhèng, the seven governors. The Sun (太阳), the Moon (太阴) and the five visible planets, named for the elements: Jupiter as Wood Star (木星), Mars as Fire Star (火星), Saturn as Earth Star (土星), Venus as Metal Star (金星), Mercury as Water Star (水星). Real bodies, at their real positions.
- 罗睺 Luóhóu (Rahu) and 计都 Jìdū (Ketu). The lunar nodes, the two points where the Moon's orbit crosses the Sun's path. Not bodies but calculated points, and the same pair Jyotish uses under the same names; the names arrived with Indian astrology. AsterNym computes them on every natal chart.
- 月孛 Yuèbèi. The lunar apogee, the point where the Moon is farthest from Earth, which moves round the zodiac in about nine years. Western astrology's Black Moon Lilith is the same point under a different name.
- 紫气 Zǐqì. A purely calculated point with no astronomical body behind it, cycling through the zodiac in roughly twenty-eight years. Its definition varies between texts, which is one reason modern reconstructions of the system disagree.
The four remainders are the tell. Two of them are the Indian nodes under their Indian names, one is the lunar apogee, and one is an invented cycle. That mixture is exactly what you would expect from a system assembled in the Tang from imported astrology and native calendar science.
Mansions and palaces
Positions are placed against the 二十八宿 èrshíbā xiù, the 28 lunar mansions: unequal divisions of the sky along the celestial equator, named for their marker stars, that Chinese astronomy had used since before the Han. They are the native Chinese framework. The twelve palaces, and the twelve sidereal signs the later texts also use, are the imported one: the Indian rāśi arrived in Chinese translation during the Tang and were laid over the mansions.
A Qi Zheng Si Yu chart therefore has two coordinate systems on it at once, the mansions and the signs, and a reading draws on the rulerships, dignities and aspects of the planets within both. The Tang text most often cited is 《果老星宗》 (Guolao Xingzong), attributed to the Daoist Zhang Guo, and the tradition's technical apparatus, houses, planetary lords, benefic and malefic distinctions, is recognisably the same apparatus a Hellenistic or Indian astrologer would use, because that is where it came from.
Why it faded, and why it is back
The imperial almanac was a state monopoly and its astronomers were court officials; when the court's astronomy was reformed with Western methods in the seventeenth century and then collapsed with the dynasty in the twentieth, the institutional home of planetary astrology went with it. BaZi and Zi Wei needed no institution. They kept going.
The revival is recent and it is a reconstruction. Modern practitioners take the old texts, supply the positions from a modern ephemeris, and fill the gaps in the texts with decisions. Where Ziqi starts, which mansion boundaries to use, how to convert between mansions and signs, whether to work tropically or sidereally: different schools answer differently, and the answers change the chart. Anyone offering a Qi Zheng Si Yu reading should be able to say which conventions they used.
A revived system is a new system with old vocabulary. That is not a criticism; it is what a revival is, and the honest ones say so.
Can it predict?
No better than the systems it resembles. Qi Zheng Si Yu inherits the whole structure of horoscopic astrology, and horoscopic astrology has not shown predictive power under test. What the system does offer, and what makes it worth knowing about, is a clean answer to a question people ask about Chinese astrology: is there a version that looks at the actual sky? There is. It is this one, and it looks a great deal like everyone else's.
Lily Lau