Zi Wei Dou Shu: Palaces and Stars

Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗數), "Purple Star Astrology", is the other great birth-chart system of China alongside BaZi. Instead of four pillars, it lays your life out in twelve palaces and places a set of named stars in them, starting from the Zi Wei, the Purple Star, which classical astronomers identified with the pole star.

The twelve palaces

A Zi Wei chart is a square of twelve boxes, one for each Earthly Branch, arranged around the edge. Each box is a palace — an area of life. The Life palace is found first from your lunar birth month and birth hour, and the other eleven follow in a fixed order around the chart.

Readers also look at the palaces opposite and at an angle to each one: the Travel palace, for example, sits opposite the Life palace and shows how you come across to the outside world.

The five element bureau

Before any star can be placed, the chart needs its "bureau" (局). It comes from the Nayin element of the Life palace's stem and branch — the same Nayin you can look up in the sixty Jiazi table. The bureau's number sets the pace at which the Zi Wei star moves through the palaces as the lunar day of your birth goes up.

The fourteen main stars

Once the Zi Wei star is placed from your lunar birthday and bureau, the other main stars follow in two groups. Six stars travel with Zi Wei at fixed distances. Eight more follow the Tian Fu star, which mirrors Zi Wei across the line between the Yin and Shen palaces. The placements below are read directly from Fate Hall's own code.

A palace with several main stars combines their themes; a palace with none "borrows" the stars of the palace opposite. The stars that fall in your Life palace are the headline of the chart.

What Fate Hall shows — and what it leaves out

Full Zi Wei Dou Shu uses more than a hundred minor stars, the four transformations (化祿, 化權, 化科, 化忌) that colour the main stars by birth year, and ten-year cycles of its own. Fate Hall shows a simplified chart: the twelve palaces, the bureau and the fourteen main stars with short readings. That is enough to see the overall shape of a chart and compare it with your BaZi reading, but it is not a full professional analysis.

Zi Wei Dou Shu works from the lunar calendar. Fate Hall converts your birth date with the Korean lunar calendar of the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, which matches the Chinese lunar calendar on almost every day; on the rare days they differ, results can differ from Chinese software.

Common questions

Do I need my birth time? Yes. The Life palace depends on the birth hour, so without it the whole chart shifts. If your time is unknown, read the Zi Wei chart only as a curiosity.

Which is better, BaZi or Zi Wei Dou Shu? They are different lenses on the same birth moment. BaZi looks at the balance of elements; Zi Wei Dou Shu tells a story palace by palace. Many readers like to see both — which is why Fate Hall puts them side by side.

Related guides

• The Sixty Jiazi and NayinAll sixty stem-branch pairs from Jia Zi to Gui Hai, with their animal, Nayin element and years from 1924 to 2043, and how the cycle counts years, months, days and hours.
• The Twelve Earthly BranchesThe twelve branches from Zi (Rat) to Hai (Pig): their element, solar month, double hour and hidden stems, and the harmonies and clashes between them.
• How Fate Hall CalculatesStep by step, how Fate Hall turns your birth details into a chart: time zones and daylight saving, true solar time, solar terms, the four pillars, Luck Pillars and the lunar calendar — and how each step is checked.