Your Zi Wei Dou Shu chart

01

What Zi Wei Dou Shu is

Zi Wei Dou Shu splits your life into twelve areas and puts named stars into each one. Which stars land where is the reading. There is no single sign and no personality type here: it is a layout, and what you read is what fell where.

紫微斗數, often translated as Purple Star Astrology after its lead star 紫微. Traditionally attributed to Chen Tuan 陳摶, a Daoist of the tenth century, though the surviving textual record is much later; the principal compilations, including the 紫微斗數全書, circulate in editions from the Ming dynasty onward.

Your chart is built from your lunar birth date and your birth hour. Your twelve palaces each stand for an area of life. Named stars are placed into them by fixed rules, and the reading comes from which stars sit where, which palaces face each other, and how the birth year transforms four of them. Nothing in the chart is a personality type. It is a layout to be read.

03

Your 12 palaces

Each palace below says what it covers in your life first. The Chinese name is the reference and the English label is shorthand, and each one narrows a palace that the tradition reads more widely than a single word can carry.

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  命宮 Ming Gong

  Life Palace

  who you are before life happens to you: your temperament, your constitution, and how you come across to people who have just met you

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  兄弟宮 Xiong Di Gong

  Siblings Palace

  your brothers and sisters, your close peers, and the help you get from people who are your equals

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  夫妻宮 Fu Qi Gong

  Spouse Palace

  marriage and long partnership, and the kind of partner you are drawn to

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  子女宮 Zi Nu Gong

  Children Palace

  your children and students, and what you make that outlasts you

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  財帛宮 Cai Bo Gong

  Wealth Palace

  money: how it reaches you, how you hold on to it, and how you spend it

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  疾厄宮 Ji E Gong

  Health Palace

  your constitution, your energy and the pace that suits you, read symbolically rather than medically

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  遷移宮 Qian Yi Gong

  Travel Palace

  moving, travel, and how you do when you are away from home

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  交友宮 Jiao You Gong

  Friends Palace

  your friends, colleagues and the wider circle around you, including the people who work for you

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  官祿宮 Guan Lu Gong

  Career Palace

  your work, your standing in it, and the direction it wants to go

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  田宅宮 Tian Zhai Gong

  Property Palace

  your home and land, the family estate, and what you accumulate over a life

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  福德宮 Fu De Gong

  Fortune Palace

  your inner life: what contents you, what you enjoy, what you worry over, and your taste

• 

  父母宮 Fu Mu Gong

  Parents Palace

  your parents and elders, the people above you, and the circumstances you inherited

04

Your 14 major stars

The fourteen major stars are placed in two sequences. The 紫微 sequence is fixed once 紫微 is located. The 天府 sequence is fixed once 天府 is located opposite it across the 寅申 axis. The themes below are the tradition's shorthand, and a star reads differently by palace, by company and by transformation.

05

Life Palace 命宮 and Body Palace 身宮

Your Life Palace is located from your lunar birth month and your birth hour. Within Zi Wei Dou Shu it is read as the person at root: temperament, constitution and the manner of meeting the world. Its stem and branch also drive the whole construction, because the Five-Element Bureau is derived from them and the Bureau locates 紫微.

Your Body Palace comes from the same month and hour, counted the other way. It always coincides with one of six palaces: Life, Spouse, Wealth, Travel, Career or Fortune. Tradition reads it as the area of life that gathers weight over time, and as the palace through which the Life Palace is expressed in practice. Neither reduces to a slogan. “Personality” for one and “actions” for the other is a teaching simplification, and the readings above the fold treat both as areas to reflect on.

06

The Four Transformations 四化

Each Heavenly Stem transforms four of the stars. Your birth-year stem gives you the natal set, 生年四化, and those four stars carry a changed emphasis wherever they sit. Which stars transform depends on the year alone, so the set is fixed even when the hour is not.

化祿 Hua Lu · Fortune

ease, resources, attraction. Whatever the star stands for comes more easily and draws things toward it.

化權 Hua Quan · Power

agency, pressure, control. The star's matter is pushed, taken in hand, and argued over.

化科 Hua Ke · Status

visibility, recognition, refinement. The star's matter is seen, named and polished, for better or worse.

化忌 Hua Ji · Obstacle

friction, attachment, complication. The star's matter sticks, tangles and asks for attention.

The stem-to-star table is not identical across lineages. The 庚-year 化科 is the best-known disagreement. AsterNym's San He-based core implementation records one table under a version string in the calculation panel, so a change of table is a visible change, never a silent one.

07

How San He reads a palace: 三方四正

No palace of yours is read alone. San He reads each one with its opposite palace (對宮, six places away) and its two trine palaces (三合, four places away on each side). The four together are the 三方四正, and the stars in all four are weighed before anything is said about one.

The same shape applies to every palace. Each life-area reading on this page names its opposite and its trines so you can read the group as the tradition does.

08

Decade cycles 大限

The chart is timed in ten-year periods. The first decade begins at the Bureau number: 2 for Water, 3 for Wood, 4 for Metal, 5 for Earth, 6 for Fire. Each decade occupies the next palace in the direction of travel, starting from the Life Palace.

Direction depends on the birth-year polarity and recorded sex together. Yang-year male and yin-year female run forward; yin-year male and yang-year female run reverse. Without a recorded sex the page withholds the decades instead of guessing. The rule, the start age and the Bureau are printed in the calculation panel.

09

Without a birth time

Your birth hour matters more here than in most systems. Your Life Palace is located from the lunar month and the hour together, and the Bureau and the position of 紫微 follow from it. A wrong hour can produce a materially different chart.

So without a time this page does not pick noon and hope. It builds all twelve hour charts, plus the late-子 case where a birth between 23:00 and 23:59 is charted on the next lunar day, and reports which conclusions hold across all of them and which do not. Which four stars carry your 生年四化 holds, because it depends on the year alone. Which palaces they land in usually does not, and the page says so instead of quietly letting it move.

10

Calculation method and conventions

Zi Wei Dou Shu has no single universal implementation. Lineages differ on the year boundary, the day boundary at late 子, leap months, which auxiliary stars are included, star brightness and parts of the 四化 table. Mixing rules from different schools produces a chart that is internally inconsistent and looks normal. This page runs AsterNym's San He-based core implementation: San He chart construction, with star-brightness interpretation not yet configured.

Your lunar month and birth hour locate your Life Palace. Its palace stem and branch derive the Five-Element Bureau. The Bureau together with the lunar birth day locates 紫微; the remaining major stars are placed through the 紫微 and 天府 sequences. Every convention below is recorded with the chart and printed in the calculation panel.

year_boundary_policy · lunar_new_year

The Zi Wei year changes at Lunar New Year (正月初一). BaZi on this site changes its year at Li Chun 立春.

day_boundary_policy · late_zi_roll_forward

A birth between 23:00 and 23:59 (late 子) is charted on the next lunar day. Some lineages keep it on the civil day instead.

leap_month_policy · same_number_as_repeated_month

A leap month is counted under the number of the month it repeats. Some lineages split it, assigning the first half to that month and the second half to the next.

time_policy · recorded_civil_local_time

The hour branch is read from the recorded civil clock time in the birth zone, with no solar-time correction.

reference_implementation · none designated

No external Zi Wei calculator has been designated as the one this engine must match, so nothing here has been reconciled chart by chart against another implementation. The placement rules are published above and every star carries the rule that produced it, which is what lets you check a position by hand; it is not the same as an independent implementation agreeing.

brightness_school · not configured

Star brightness (廟旺利陷) is a table of nearly two hundred values that differs between lineages. The engine reports it as not configured under not-configured-v1 until a school is chosen, and no reading here depends on it.

sihua_table_version · asternym-ziwei-sihua-v1

The stem-to-star Four Transformations table in force, including the 庚-year 化科 choice.

11

Zi Wei Dou Shu and BaZi

Both read your life from your birth moment. BaZi works with eight characters and the balance of five elements between them. Zi Wei places named stars into twelve palaces and reads their combinations. Practitioners often use both, and the traditional division of labour is that BaZi reads the shape of a life and Zi Wei the detail of its domains.

They do not share a year. AsterNym's BaZi begins its year at Li Chun 立春, around 4 February. AsterNym's Zi Wei implementation begins its year at Lunar New Year, which moves and usually falls later. A birth on 10 February 2026 is after Li Chun and before Lunar New Year: BaZi reads that year as 丙午 and this Zi Wei chart reads it as 乙巳. The year stem sets the palace stems through 五虎遁, the Bureau and all four 生年四化, so an engine that borrows the BaZi year can produce a materially different chart for these births. Where your birth falls in that window the calculation panel shows both values and flags the difference.

12

Sources and further reading

• 紫微斗數全書, the principal traditional compilation, in Ming-era and later editions. The traditional attribution to Chen Tuan 陳摶 comes from this textual tradition.
• San He 三合 school conventions for palace layout, the Bureau, star placement and the birth-year Four Transformations, as recorded in the calculation panel under version strings.
• Lunar calendar conversion and Lunar New Year boundaries from the lunar-javascript library, with the BaZi Li Chun value computed alongside for comparison.

• BaZi: Four PillarsThe other Chinese system, with a different year boundary
• Your BaZi year aheadTai Sui and the annual reading
• Birth SkyThe real stars over your birthplace at the moment you were born
• My AsterNymEvery tradition on the site in one place