The 12 Palaces of Zi Wei Dou Shu

The twelve palaces in chart order

The four trine groups are fixed: Life with Wealth and Career; Siblings with Health and Property; Spouse with Travel and Wellbeing; Children with Friends and Parents. Opposites are always six cells apart.

How the Life Palace and Body Palace are located

1. Start at the Yin (寅) cell and count forward one cell per lunar month up to the birth month. That cell stands for the month.
2. From the month cell, count backward one cell per hour branch, starting at Zi, until you reach the birth hour. That cell is the Life Palace (命宮).
3. From the same month cell, count forward one cell per hour branch to the birth hour. That cell is the Body Palace (身宮).
4. Place the remaining eleven palaces counter-clockwise from the Life Palace in the order of the table above.

Because the backward and forward counts are symmetric around the month cell, the Body Palace can only fall on six of the twelve palaces:

The Body Palace is a secondary reference for how the person acts and adapts after the first half of life. It is read alongside the Life Palace, never instead of it.

San Fang Si Zheng: reading a palace in context

三方四正 means "three directions, four squares". For any palace, the three directions are the palace itself and its two trine partners (four cells apart in each direction); the fourth square is the opposite palace. Stars in those four cells all bear on the domain being read. A reading of the Life Palace therefore also reads the Wealth, Career, and Travel palaces; a reading of the Spouse Palace also reads Travel, Wellbeing, and Career.

An empty palace, one with no major star, is normal. It is read by borrowing the major stars of its opposite palace, and by weighing its trine partners more heavily. Empty does not mean absent: in the worked example below, two palaces are empty and both still have a reading.

Worked example

Birth: 6 February 1995, 15:00 to 17:00 (Shen hour), male. The lunar month is the first month, so the month cell is 寅. The Shen hour is the ninth branch, so counting back from 寅 lands the Life Palace at 午, and counting forward lands the Body Palace at 戌, which is the Career Palace. That matches the table above: a Shen-hour birth always puts the Body Palace on the Career Palace.

Reading the Life Palace here means reading 午 (Zi Wei), 子 opposite (Tan Lang), and the trine cells 寅 (Wu Qu, Tian Xiang) and 戌 (Lian Zhen, Tian Fu) together. The Property and Parents palaces are empty and borrow from Children and Health respectively.

Where translations and schools differ

• Some lineages rename 僕役 (servants) to 交友 (friends) and 官祿 (official salary) to 事業 (career). The cell and its meaning are the same.
• Flying Star schools add a thirteenth reference, the 來因宮 (Origin Palace), which is the palace whose stem matches the birth-year stem. San He readings do not use it.
• Every lineage agrees on the order and on the trine and opposite structure. Only the labels and the emphasis move.

Common mistakes

• Reading the Spouse Palace of a Zi Wei chart as if it were the BaZi Spouse Palace. In BaZi that phrase usually means the Earthly Branch of the day pillar; in Zi Wei it is a palace holding stars. Different objects.
• Treating an empty Life Palace as a missing personality. It is read from the opposite Travel Palace and the trine.
• Assuming the Wellbeing Palace (福德) is about luck. It is about the inner life: enjoyment, mental habits, what the person spends freely on.
• Counting the palaces clockwise. The order runs counter-clockwise from the Life Palace on a standard chart.

Questions people ask

Related concepts

• What is Zi Wei Dou Shu?Definition and structure
• The 14 major starsWhat sits inside the palaces
• The Four TransformationsLabels that modify a star in a palace
• How a chart is calculatedIncluding the Life Palace and bureau steps
• How to read a Zi Wei chartProcedure with the same worked example

Sources and calculation version

• iztro documentation · palace order and Body Palace placement as implemented
• Calculation assumptions on kaucim.ai

Last checked against the chart engine on 2026-09-14.