A Worked Zi Wei Chart: Su Shi, Read in Order
One historical chart — the Song poet Su Shi — built from the birth record to a reading, step by step, with the arithmetic shown at every stage.
How is a Zi Wei Dou Shu chart actually read?
A reading starts from the Life palace, then checks the palace opposite it and the two three positions away, because a palace is never judged alone. Stars, their brightness, and the four transformations are layered on top of that frame.
Zi Wei Dou Shu is easier to learn by watching one chart built than by reading twelve pages about stars. So this page builds one, in full, and shows the arithmetic at every step. The chart belongs to Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101), the Song-dynasty poet and official.
The reading in brief
Before the arithmetic, the answer — so that the shape of the life is on the table while the chart is being built rather than at the end of it. Su Shi's chart reads as one structure in four parts.
- 戌 · Life Palace — 紫微 with 天相. The Emperor star and the minister star in the same square. Whatever else this chart is about, it is about capacity for office: judgement, position, and holding a post without being consumed by it.
- 辰 · the Body Palace, sitting in the Travel square — 破军 with 陀罗. The Body Palace falls directly opposite the Life Palace, in the square of movement, and it carries the star of rupture. The life is pulled outward, and it is pulled outward more than once.
- 寅 · Career — 廉贞 carrying the chart's only 化忌, with 地劫 and 天马 beside it. The one square where the year stem plants a knot is the square of the working life, and it holds the movement star as well.
- 子 · Fortune — 七杀 alone. The inner life is handed the star that will not settle. The Fortune Palace is where a chart says whether what a person has is enough.
Everything below is the working: how each of those placements is produced, what the remaining eight squares add, and where the reading has to stop.
Why a historical figure, and not a volunteer
A worked reading needs a birth record that is public, fixed and checkable. Using a living person's chart would mean publishing someone's birth data next to a reading of their character — a much larger thing to consent to than it sounds when agreed to in a message, and not something a page can honestly claim to have obtained.
A figure from the historical record has none of those problems. The birth data is in the annals, the life is in the biographical record, and any reader who wants to check the reading can go and read the same sources.
It also fixes what this page is allowed to claim. Su Shi died in 1101. A chart cast for a man who has been dead for nine centuries cannot be read as a prediction of anything: the life is closed and the record is already written. What is being examined here is whether the structure the rules produce has anything to do with the life that was actually lived. That is a weaker claim than prediction, and an honest one.
The birth data, and what each part fixes
| Recorded | Value | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 丙子 bing-zi | Which four stars the year stem activates as 禄 权 科 忌 |
| Lunar month | 12th month | Where the Life Palace starts counting from |
| Lunar day | 19th day | Where the Emperor star 紫微 falls |
| Hour | 卯 mao · 05:00–07:00 | The Life Palace and the Body Palace |
The Gregorian equivalent usually quoted is 8 January 1037. What matters for the chart is the lunar date and the two-hour period, and both are recorded.
One caveat belongs here rather than in a footnote. The hour is the traditional biographies' mao, and Zi Wei needs no finer resolution than that — two-hour periods are the unit the system was built on. But the hour is also the single input most likely to be wrong in any chart, historical or modern, and it is the input the whole chart pivots on.
Step 1 — the Life Palace
Start at 寅, the first lunar month, and count forward to the birth month. The twelfth month is 丑. From 子, count backwards to the birth hour: 卯 is the third period back, which lands on 戌. The Life Palace is 戌.
Run the same count forward instead of backward and you get the Body Palace: 辰. In this chart the Body Palace shares a square with the Travel palace — where life pushes outward.
Step 2 — the bureau
The palace stem follows from the year stem. A 丙 year starts the 寅 palace at 庚 and counts forward, which gives the Life Palace the stem 戊 — 戊戌, whose element pair is Wood. That fixes the Wood 3 bureau.
The bureau is not a personality label and nothing is interpreted from it. It is the number used in the next step, and the age at which the decades begin.
Step 3 — placing the Emperor star
Wood 3, lunar day 19. Divide 19 by 3: six with a remainder of one. The remainder is not zero, so take the complement (3 − 1 = 2) — even, which means count forward — and the rounded-up quotient, 7. From 寅, seven places forward is 申; then two more places forward lands on 戌.
So 紫微 sits in the Life Palace itself — the Emperor star and the Life Palace in the same square, with 天相 beside it. 天府 mirrors across the 寅–申 axis and falls in 午.
Step 4 — the fourteen stars fall into place
Everything after this is counting. The Zi Wei group of six is placed backwards from the Emperor; the Tian Fu group of eight is placed forwards from 天府. Empty squares are normal — fourteen stars cannot fill twelve squares evenly, and the palaces here are exactly the ones the arithmetic produces.
| Palace | Name | Major stars | Auxiliary |
|---|---|---|---|
| 庚寅 Yin | 官禄 | 廉贞 忌 | 地劫 天马 |
| 辛卯 Mao | 交友 | — | 左辅 |
| 壬辰 Chen | 迁移 ·Body | 破军 | 陀罗 |
| 癸巳 Si | 疾厄 | 天同 禄 | 禄存 火星 |
| 甲午 Wu | 财帛 | 武曲 天府 | 擎羊 |
| 乙未 Wei | 子女 | 太阳 太阴 | 文昌 文曲 |
| 丙申 Shen | 夫妻 | 贪狼 | 地空 |
| 丁酉 You | 兄弟 | 天机 权 巨门 | 天钺 |
| 戊戌 Xu | 命宫 ·Life | 紫微 天相 | — |
| 己亥 Hai | 父母 | 天梁 | 右弼 天魁 |
| 庚子 Zi | 福德 | 七杀 | — |
| 辛丑 Chou | 田宅 | — | 铃星 |
Still nothing has been interpreted. That is deliberate: the discipline of the system is that construction and reading are separate passes, and the mistakes beginners make are almost always made by reading a star before the chart is finished.
Step 5 — the four transformations
A 丙 year stem activates four stars: 天同 as 化禄, 天机 as 化权, 文昌 as 化科 and 廉贞 as 化忌. Which four depends entirely on the year stem — the same twelve palaces and the same fourteen stars with a different birth year would light up four completely different squares.
禄 权 科 忌 are not four grades of good and bad. 禄 is the easy, flowing face of a star — where things arrive without being forced. 权 is its authority, the face that commands. 科 is its visibility, the face that gets recognised. 忌 is its knot: the face of it that keeps asking for attention, and the one readers are taught to look at first and trust last.
Here they land in the Health palace (天同), the Siblings palace (天机), the Children palace (文昌, an auxiliary star — the transformations do not restrict themselves to the major ones), and the Career palace (廉贞).
Step 6 — the Life Palace and its three companions
The Life Palace is never read alone. It is read as a quartet: the palace itself, the palace directly opposite, and the two that sit at the trine. That rule turns twelve boxes into a system.
- 戌 · Life Palace — 紫微 with 天相. The emperor and the minister in one square: a chart about capacity for office, judgement and holding a position.
- 辰 · opposite, and the Body Palace — 破军 with 陀罗. The star of rupture and rebuilding sits directly across from the Life Palace.
- 寅 · Career — 廉贞 carrying the chart's only 化忌, with 地劫 and 天马 (movement) alongside.
- 午 · Wealth — 武曲 with 天府, plus 擎羊.
Read as structure rather than as fate, the Life axis describes a life organised around standing near authority and being repeatedly moved away from it: the capacity for office on one side, the star of disruption directly opposite, and the career square holding the one place in the chart where effort leaks. Su Shi's own record — a man of first-class administrative talent who spent his career being posted, tried and exiled — is what that structure looks like when it is lived.
Step 7 — the twelve palaces, read one by one
The chart is built; this is the reading. The squares are walked in the standard order — outward from the Life Palace, one square at a time, through the twelve areas a life is divided into. Each entry gives the square, the stem and branch it carries, the stars standing in it, the area it governs, and how the star there is read in that square specifically. Each heading links to the full page for that palace.
Two rules are working quietly underneath. A square with no major star is not blank — it borrows the square directly opposite and the two are read together. And no square is a verdict: a palace names an area of life and the pressure inside it, never the outcome.
Commanding presence and an early sense of self. Life is organised around position and responsibility rather than exploration. The recurring test is learning to be ordinary with people.
Measured, correct, well-presented and dependable, with a strong instinct for what is appropriate. The life is orderly and the growth is in developing a preference of your own.
天钺
Bright, competitive siblings and a relationship that functions more like an exchange of ideas than a family bond. Mutual help usually comes in the form of good advice.
Relations with siblings run through words — arguments, comparisons, and long-standing quarrels that are occasionally about nothing else. Distance is common and not necessarily hostile.
The year stem activates 天机 as 化权 here — the star's authority, the face that commands.
地空
The most romantically active placement in the system, which the classical texts read with caution and which in practice means many options and a real risk of difficulty choosing. The marriage that works for this star is with someone who is interesting for a long time.
文昌 文曲
Children with open temperaments and, traditionally, a strong bond with sons. Expect to be visibly involved in their lives rather than in the background.
A close relationship with daughters in the traditional reading, and in general with children who are themselves sensitive. You parent by noticing, which works well and occasionally over-functions.
The year stem activates 文昌 as 化科 here — the star's visibility, the face that is recognised.
擎羊
The best classical wealth placement in the system: money earned through capability, retained through discipline, grown through long holding. The risk is not loss but joylessness — a treasury nobody spends.
The strongest retention placement in the system. You accumulate, hold and grow assets steadily; the classical risk is never converting any of it into something that was the point.
禄存 火星
Generally good, with the traditional vulnerabilities being emotional and metabolic — fluid retention and mood in the classical reading. Adequate rest genuinely matters for this placement.
The year stem activates 天同 as 化禄 here — the easy, flowing face of the star, where things come without forcing.
陀罗
The travel palace placement for this star is a strong argument for living away from where you started. Movement and reinvention in a new place produce far better outcomes than the same effort at home.
左辅
No major star sits in this square. The standing rule is to borrow the square directly opposite — 天机 巨门 — and read the two together, so what follows is the borrowed star read in this palace.
A wide and fluid network rather than a fixed circle. You are good at meeting people and comparatively poor at maintaining the ones you already have.
Real friendships form slowly here because people read the critical faculty first. Once formed, they are strong — and the ones lost tend to be lost over something that was said.
地劫 天马
Law, enforcement, discipline, performance, design, media, and any field with a public standard attached. The intensity that complicates private life is the same quality that makes the professional reputation.
The year stem activates 廉贞 as 化忌 here — the star's knot — the face of it that keeps asking for attention.
铃星
No major star sits in this square. The standing rule is to borrow the square directly opposite — 太阳 太阴 — and read the two together, so what follows is the borrowed star read in this palace.
A bright, well-situated home that often becomes a gathering place. Property tends towards quality and, traditionally, southern aspect.
The strongest of the classical property stars, together with Tian Fu. Land and buildings accumulate across the lifetime of this placement, often quietly.
An intense inner life under considerable pressure, requiring a real outlet — physical, professional or creative. Without one, this palace placement produces the irritable exhaustion of an unspent force.
右弼 天魁
A strong, protective parental influence and sometimes a parent who needed protecting. Either way, the family relationship shapes the career of care.
Read as a whole, the twelve squares are consistent about one thing. This is a chart with a well-held centre and a restless perimeter: the Life Palace has 紫微 and 天相 together, and the squares carrying the movement stars — 破军 directly opposite, 天马 in the Career square — are the ones the biography keeps returning to. That is a description of a shape, not of an outcome, and it is the same shape the record describes from the other direction.
Step 8 — the decades, and what the record gives
Decades run from the Life Palace, one palace per ten years, starting at the bureau number. This chart is a yang year and a male chart, so they run forward. Reading them against the biography is the only place a chart can even appear to be tested, and it is also where the most caution is needed.
| Ages | Palace | What sits there, and what the record shows |
|---|---|---|
| 3–12 | 命宫 | Childhood and the household that taught him to read. The Life Palace itself: 紫微 with 天相, the emperor seated beside his minister. |
| 13–22 | 父母 | The palace of elders and mentors — 天梁, the star of the senior hand, with the nobleman stars 天魁 beside it. In 1057 he sat the metropolitan examination and was picked out by the chief examiner Ouyang Xiu. |
| 23–32 | 福德 | The palace of the inner life, holding 七杀 — the star that does not settle. These are the years the record marks with the deaths of his first wife in 1065 and his father in 1066. |
| 33–42 | 田宅 | The palace of household and posting, carrying 铃星. The new-law years pushed him out of the capital and through a run of provincial posts: Hangzhou, Mizhou, Xuzhou, Huzhou. |
| 43–52 | 官禄 | The career palace — and it holds the chart's only 化忌, on 廉贞, with 天马 (movement) and 地劫 beside it. 1079 is the year of the poetry case that put him in prison, then in exile at Huangzhou. |
| 53–62 | 交友 | The palace of colleagues and friendships, with 左辅. The last decade, and the furthest exiles: Huizhou in 1094, then Danzhou on Hainan in 1097. |
The alignment worth noticing is at ages 43–52: the decade whose career square carries the only 化忌 is the decade the record marks as the catastrophe — 1079, the poetry case, prison, and exile to Huangzhou. It is a real correspondence and it is right to be suspicious of it. A 化忌 does not say prison; it says preoccupation, the area effort leaks into. Read after the fact the two line up. Read before the fact, the same square could just as easily have meant a decade of grinding administrative work. Nothing in a chart schedules a trial, and the decade boundaries themselves move if you count ages by a different convention.
What this reading does and does not claim
It claims that the rules, applied to a documented birth record, produce a structure with a recognisable shape: office near power, disruption opposite it, a career square holding the chart's one knot. That is a description of a pattern, and the pattern is what a reader of the life would recognise.
It does not claim that anything was predicted. The chart does not say what Su Shi should have done, does not schedule his exile, and does not know what he wrote. It also does not make him a poet: he wrote, and the chart did not write anything. A reading that speaks with more certainty than the method carries is not a better reading.
The last thing this page is not: proof. One retrospective case settles nothing. What can be checked is the part that is arithmetic — every placement above follows from the four recorded inputs and the published rules, and you can verify each step against how a Zi Wei chart is calculated.
Questions this page raises
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