What You Get
Four Layers, Not Just a Chart
Most calculators hand you a diagram and one interpretation. We give you four layers — who you are, plus where your focus sits across time.
Your Innate Structure
The arrangement of stars at the moment you were born: your natural disposition, where your talents lean, and the underlying shape of career, money, relationships, health, and social life. It doesn't predict what will happen to you — it describes how you're built and what you naturally tend toward. Everything else builds on this layer.
The Ten-Year Rhythm
Life read in ten-year stages, showing where the weight falls in each. One decade puts career in the foreground; another brings relationships or family forward. It shows you which stage you're in now and where the next one points.
The Shape of a Year
A single year in focus: which areas are active, which themes stand out. Not a forecast of events — a reading of where the year's weight is concentrated.
Month by Month, Read for You
The finest-grained and most personal of the four. Not a generic monthly horoscope — this reads your own chart and names what's worth your attention in each specific month. This layer does four further things, set out below.
The Monthly Layer
The Finest Layer Does Four Things
A generic monthly horoscope says the same thing to everyone born under the same sign. The monthly layer reads your own chart.
Themes Drawn From Your Chart
Each month starts from your chart and names where your energy is worth spending — which themes come forward, and where the weight of the month sits. Not one shared calendar handed to everybody, but a reading written for this chart.
Open the Next 12 Months Early
SubscriptionYou don't have to wait for each month to arrive. Open all twelve months ahead in one go and see how the focus shifts across the coming year. Generating the full set takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes, and the results stay in your account permanently.
Integrated With the Four Transformations
The monthly reading incorporates the Four Transformations, showing how force moves through the month — which areas are pulled on, where the energy gathers, and where the tension forms. It gives the month direction rather than just a list of stars.
Monthly Reminders
Each month the system compiles that month's reading for you and sends it out. You don't have to remember to come back — what's worth noticing arrives when it's worth noticing.
Accuracy
Just Enter Your Birth City. We Handle the Rest.
Everything in Zi Wei Dou Shu starts with the hour of birth. The hour fixes the Life Palace, and the Life Palace fixes the arrangement of the entire chart. Off by one shichen (two-hour period) and every one of the twelve palaces shifts.
But clock time isn't sky time. Within a single time zone, the east and west edges can differ by tens of minutes of real daylight — and daylight saving rules have changed by decade and by country. Those gaps are more than enough to push a birth into the adjacent shichen.
That's why we ask for your birth city. The system retrieves the time zone rules actually in force at that place on the day you were born — including whether daylight saving applied that year — computes true solar time from the local longitude, and derives your shichen from that. You don't need to understand any of it. Just enter the city.
If we can't resolve it, we don't guess
When time zone data can't be retrieved, we don't fall back to an estimate and carry on calculating. We ask you to try again shortly. We'd rather keep you waiting than hand you a chart that's wrong.
The Basics
What Is Zi Wei Dou Shu?
Zi Wei Dou Shu — often translated as Purple Star Astrology — is a Chinese system that casts a chart from your birth time and place. The chart is built from twelve palaces, each corresponding to a domain of life. Stars fall into those palaces, and their placement describes your disposition and the shape of each area.
Its subject is who you naturally are, not what will happen to you. Compared with Western astrology, Zi Wei puts more weight on how stars relate to one another, and on how the centre of gravity moves across different stages of life.
Chart Structure
The Twelve Palaces
Twelve palaces sit around the chart, each holding one domain of life. Every report you receive unfolds across these twelve positions.
The Stars
The Language of the Chart
Stars are the vocabulary of a chart. Each carries its own character, and that character changes with the palace it lands in and the stars it sits beside.
The Fourteen Major Stars
The major stars set the basic character of a palace and form the skeleton of the whole chart.
Auxiliary and Malefic Stars
Auxiliary stars lend support; malefic stars bring friction and difficulty. They adjust the force of the major stars and give the chart its depth.
The Four Transformations
Hua Lu, Hua Quan, Hua Ke, and Hua Ji are triggered by the Heavenly Stems and describe how force flows and pulls between palaces. This is the most flexible and most decisive mechanism in the system — it's what gives a static chart direction.
Pricing
The Reports Are Free, and They're Yours to Keep
Free
All four report layers in full
Natal, decade, annual, and monthly, covering all twelve palaces. Not a trial, not an abridged preview. Once generated, they stay in your account permanently and you can return to them whenever you like.
Paid
Four Transformations
Hua Lu, Hua Quan, Hua Ke and Hua Ji describe how force moves and pulls between palaces, giving a static chart its sense of direction: how each area influences the others, where energy concentrates, and where the tension sits. This takes deeper analysis and computation, which is why it's paid.
The reports show you what your chart looks like. The Four Transformations show you how those forces actually work. The reports are free so you can read the real thing and judge the quality yourself before deciding whether the deeper layer is worth it.
Opening the next twelve months of the monthly layer early is a subscription feature.
Generating a report creates an account — that's where your reports live, so you can come back to them anytime.
Frequently Asked Questions
01What information do I need?
Your birth date, birth time (hour and minute), and birthplace. The birth time matters most — the shichen determines your Life Palace and the arrangement of every star in the chart. The birthplace is used for true solar time correction.
02Why do you need my birthplace?
To correct for true solar time. Real daylight at a given location doesn't line up exactly with clock time, and correcting for that makes the shichen more accurate and the chart closer to reality. It's a step many tools skip, and it affects the result.
03What if I don't know my exact birth time?
The more accurate your birth time, the more reliable the chart. You can still generate a report from an approximate time, but accuracy will suffer. Checking a birth certificate or asking a family member helps a great deal. If you only know a rough window, try the two adjacent hours and compare which chart fits your experience better.
04Is the report really free?
All four report layers — natal, decade, annual, and monthly, covering every palace — are free and kept permanently. The Four Transformations analysis is paid. Opening the next twelve months of the monthly layer early is a subscription feature. You can read the entire report first and then decide whether to unlock anything further.
05Is the report written by a person or by AI?
By AI, working from your own chart. The chart itself is cast by code following fixed rules — the AI writes the interpretation on top of a finished chart and never decides where a star lands. Every report is written for your chart, not assembled from templates.
06Can this predict my future?
No, and we won't claim otherwise. What it describes is your natural disposition and where the weight falls in different stages of life — another perspective to help you understand yourself, not a forecast of events.
07Is my personal data safe?
Your birth data is used only to generate your chart and reports, and it stays in your account. We don't sell your data and we don't share it with third parties.
08How far ahead can I read the annual and monthly layers?
The annual layer currently covers the near year. The monthly layer covers a twelve-month window. With a subscription you can open all twelve upcoming months at once rather than waiting for each to arrive; generating the full set takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes.
09What languages are reports available in?
You can choose your report language independently of the site language. Browse in English and receive your report in Traditional or Simplified Chinese, or the other way round.
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This service draws on traditional Chinese metaphysics and is offered for self-understanding and reference. Important decisions deserve consideration from several angles.