Everything a classical chart needs: true solar time from your birthplace, solar-to-lunar conversion, the twelve palaces, all fourteen major stars with their brightness, the fourteen auxiliaries and 38 secondary stars, natal and palace-stem Four Transformations, around forty classical patterns, decade periods in nominal age, the minor limit, and the annual and monthly overlays. The plotting method is documented step by step on our method page.

Both start from your birth moment. BaZi reduces it to eight characters and reads elemental balance, which makes it strong on temperament and broad life texture. ZWDS spreads the same moment across twelve named palaces, so it answers domain questions directly: this palace is your marriage, that one is your money. It is also more granular about timing through the decade and annual layers.

Western astrology tracks the real sky: planets in signs and houses. ZWDS stars are calculated points, not telescopic objects, placed by arithmetic from the lunar calendar. The systems ask different questions too. Western natal work leans psychological; ZWDS leans situational, with a heavy emphasis on when things change.

The hour decides the Life Palace, so an unknown hour is a real handicap. If you know part of the day, enter your best guess and take the birth-time check (定盘) under your chart: it shows you descriptions from your chart and the neighbouring hours side by side, without saying which is which, and suggests the chart that fits you better. That is the standard practice of trying the plausible hours, made blind so it is harder to fool yourself. A chart from a wrong hour is a different person.

Because the classical method runs on the sun, not the clock. Singapore and Malaysia keep UTC+8, but the sun over Singapore keeps roughly UTC+6:55, so clocks run 48 to 79 minutes ahead of solar time depending on the season (before 1982 the clocks were on UTC+7:30, and on Tokyo time during the occupation). We correct for your birthplace, the clock rules in force on your birth date, and the equation of time. For Singapore births since 1982 this moves the double hour for more than half of people. Some schools use clock time, so you can switch the correction off in Chart settings.

No. Enter your solar (Western) date and the calculator converts it to the lunar calendar internally. That conversion is the first step of the classical method anyway. Note that Zi Wei Dou Shu changes year at Chinese New Year, not at Lichun as BaZi does, so a birth in early February can carry a different year pillar in the two systems.

No. An empty palace borrows the major stars of its opposite palace, so an empty Life Palace reads through the Travel Palace: a life unusually shaped by environment and company. Emptiness changes how themes arrive, not whether you have a fate at all.

Treat it as information, not sentence. Ji marks the domain that keeps demanding attention, the lesson that repeats until learned. Many accomplished charts carry a heavy Ji precisely because the friction built the skill. The reading to avoid is pretending the knot is not there.

The engine computes every placement deterministically, then an AI narrates from that fact sheet using classical method: palace frames, borrowed stars, transformation effects, detected patterns. It is interpretation in fluent prose, not prophecy. We treat all of it as material for reflection.

When you generate a chart, the name and birth details you enter are logged on our server along with your IP address. Pressing Save and Share additionally stores the full computed chart and creates a link you control.

Once a year around the Lunar New Year is the traditional rhythm, when the incoming stem and branch take effect. Re-reading it mid-year is useful after a big change, since the annual palaces tell you which domains the year is pressing on.