Rooted in tradition, with you for what comes next

Outside the red walls of Wong Tai Sin Temple there is often a queue, and people stand in it holding the paper slip for their stick in one hand and a phone in the other. The person who built this site lives about a quarter of an hour's walk away and passes it every day.

The slip carries a verse of four old lines. Stick 56 says no one can be sure this sword will not become a dragon, and that it will leap from the sleeve at the touch of water. Most people who draw it cannot say what those two lines have to do with the matter in front of them. Some walk over to the fortune-tellers' stalls beside the main hall, and others look the number up on their phone.

In April 2026 we went round twelve of those stalls. A basic reading cost HK$30 to HK$80. Some fortune-tellers first asked what work you do and why you want to leave, and only then turned to the stick. Others opened with “Your career luck is good, but watch out for colleagues working against you,” a line that fits anyone. Some people, once the reading was done, were talked into buying a blessed bracelet for a few hundred dollars.

People also ask us why they shouldn't just have a chatbot draw a stick. In September 2026 we asked three chatbots to draw Wong Tai Sin sticks, 87 times in all in Cantonese, and not one line of the verses they wrote matches the temple booklet.

Most of the people who come to ask are between twenty and forty. Many could not tell you whether they believe in it. They want a way to think the matter through from the beginning. Of the questions we read, the most common kind asks whether something will happen.

A good reader listens to your situation before turning to the stick. kaucim set two rules on that basis from the start. The verse stays exactly as the Sik Sik Yuen booklet prints it, and the reading comes back to what you wrote down.

Every Wong Tai Sin stick has a plain-English reading written in advance for seven areas of life: career, wealth, love, health, studies, family, and the matter as a whole. All of them are free. To bring a stick back to your own situation, write down what is going on. Whether to take a new job, whether to get in touch with someone again: a sentence or two is enough, and the reading starts from there.

The more people asked, the more we saw that one matter usually leads to another. Someone asking whether to change jobs ends up wanting to know what kind of work suits them; someone asking whether to contact a person again ends up wanting to know whether the two of them really get along. Many of the stalls by the temple read palms and birth charts as well as sticks, and an older generation facing these questions would also have a chart drawn up, have two people's birth dates matched, or cast a hexagram.

So kaucim added more over time: the Che Kung and Guan Yin sticks, Zi Wei and BaZi birth charts, a two-person chart comparison, and Qi Men, Plum Blossom and the I Ching. Along the way we met practitioners in Hong Kong for long face-to-face interviews, wrote down how they read a person's situation, and used that record in the model. The site went live on 30 March 2026 with the hundred Wong Tai Sin sticks, and since May 2026, about 30,000 people have used a free reading here.

Things also don't end on the day you ask. Year Companion keeps your chart and the questions you have asked for the whole year. A question from March is taken up again in the June reading, and when your chart reaches a turning point in the month, we email you to come back and look, about a dozen times a year. You can turn those emails off at any time.

Every reading starts from something you can see. Each verse follows its own source. Guan Yin's hundred verses are compared character by character across the Hong Kong and Taiwan traditions, and wherever they differ, the page shows both. Charts are computed from calendar rules, so the same birth time always gives the same chart, and you can compute it again yourself to check. A palm reading marks which part of the hand each point comes from.

The AI writes the reading from that basis and the situation you describe. The interviews with practitioners went into fine-tuning the model, and no practitioner reviews each reading.

A stick or a chart gives you a point of reference, and the doing is still yours. Whether to talk to that person once more, which terms of a new job to pin down first: we can't decide those for you.

After you draw a stick, the page asks what you plan to do. Write a line, and thirty days later come back and check it. What you are checking is what you did after that.

A few things we will keep to. No verse will be changed by a single character, and the plain-language readings stay free. One birth time will only ever give one chart here. And who writes the readings, and from what, is set out on this page.