Zi Wei Dou Shu chart 紫微斗數
Twelve palaces, one for each area of a life, with the major stars placed where your birth minute puts them. Every star is named in English beside its character. The calculation runs in your browser and nothing is stored.
Your twelve palaces
Natal plateHow to read the plate
The square is fixed. The twelve earthly branches always sit in the same positions, reading 巳午未申 across the top and 寅丑子亥 across the bottom, and what changes from person to person is which palace lands on which branch and which stars fall inside.
Three things decide any single finding. The star supplies the kind of energy. The palace supplies the subject it acts on, whether that is career, wealth, health or the people close to you. The brightness says how cleanly it comes through where it landed. The same star in two different palaces describes two different lives.
Your self palace is marked, and so is the body palace. The first is where the chart is read from. The second is the one classical practice treats as what you grow into rather than what you start as.
What this draws, and what it leaves out
It draws the natal plate: palaces, the fourteen major stars, brightness, and the element class. It leaves out the ten-year periods on purpose, and it shows the major stars rather than the full crowd of minor ones, which run to over a hundred and are where a chart stops being readable without an interpreter.
It also corrects your birth time before placing anything. Clock time is a political convention and the sky is not, so the hour is adjusted for the longitude you were born at. That correction is printed in the middle of the plate, because it occasionally moves a birth into the neighbouring double-hour and changes the chart.
Nothing you enter leaves your browser. The chart is computed on your own device and no birth data reaches a server, including ours.
Common questions
NotesWhy does this one insist on a birth time?
Because the twelve palaces are placed from the hour. Without it there is no reduced chart to draw, only nothing. That is the one real difference from the BaZi calculator, which withholds the hour pillar and still says a great deal from the date alone. If your time is unrecorded, start there instead.
Is this the same chart the paid reading uses?
Yes. This page imports the same astrolabe function the reading pipeline runs, rather than reimplementing it, and a test compares the result against a fixed set of verified charts before anything is published. The reading adds the interpretation, not a different chart.
Why are the English star names not what I have seen elsewhere?
The English here is the plain archetype the classical text describes, not a literal rendering of the characters and not the library default. That changes one name most visibly: 七杀 is given as Vanguard rather than the literal reading, which is fear-coded and describes the star worse than the archetype does.
Where are the ten-year periods?
Deliberately not shown. Read bare, with no interpretation around them, the periods are the part of a chart most likely to be taken as fate rather than as tendency, and reading them properly is the largest single job a reading does. This page draws the natal plate and stops there.
What do the brightness words mean?
Each star sits in a palace more or less comfortably, which classical practice marks with 廟旺利陷. It is glossed here in plain words. A star at its dimmest is not a bad star; it is the same tendency expressed with more friction, and what to do about that is interpretation rather than calculation.
Is my birth data sent anywhere?
No. The computation runs in your own browser, nothing is transmitted, and there is no account step. The city list is a static file this page fetches; it does not know what you searched for.
The plate, then what it says
Or draw your four pillars →This page places the stars. Which of them matters for the question you are actually asking, and what to do about the palace it landed in, is the work a reading does, one palace at a time.
Still working out which system answers your question? Which system answers what
Method and sources
The astrolabe is computed with a deterministic library from your birth minute, corrected for true solar time at your birth longitude, so the same birth details always produce the same plate. Star characters and their English archetypes follow the classical text listed below, and the same function draws this chart and the one inside a paid reading.
Read against the classical treatment of the stars and the twelve palaces:
- 紫微斗數全書 Ziwei Doushu Quanshu The Complete Book of Zi Wei Dou Shu