[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":287},["ShallowReactive",2],{"article:bagua-map-placement:en":3,"article-topic:eight-mansions-feng-shui:en":154,"related-articles:en:eight-mansions-feng-shui:bagua-map-placement:feng-shui-luo-pan":246},{"slug":4,"title":5,"description":6,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":11,"updatedAt":11,"noindex":12,"summary":13,"sections":14,"references":117,"relatedTools":133,"seo":135,"contentImage":140},"bagua-map-placement","Bagua Map Placement: Which Wall, and Which North","The bagua map is pinned to the front door in one version and to the compass in another. What a sector contains, how much floor the centre gets, and where the two stop overlapping.","Feng Shui","eight-mansions-feng-shui","","zhang-hao","2026-10-31",false,"Two maps share the same nine trigram names and disagree about what they are pinned to. The compass version gives each trigram 45 degrees, which is exactly three of the luopan's 24 mountains, and leaves the centre with no angular width at all. The door-aligned version divides the plan into nine equal cells, so the centre holds 11.1 per cent of the floor. Rotate one against the other and the overlap is arithmetic: at 30 degrees the two southeast corners share a third of the same patch, at 45 they share nothing. On an L-shaped plan the nine cells stop being ninths, and a five-degree instrument error leaves a fifth of all headings undecided.",[15,20,64,69,75,101,106,111],{"heading":16,"body":17},"Two maps, one set of names, two anchors",[18,19],"The bagua map sold in English-language feng shui is a nine-cell overlay: eight trigrams arranged around a centre. The names and their order are identical in every version you will find. Kan sits at the bottom, then Ken, Chen, Sun, Li, Kun, Dui, Chien going round. Nothing in the disagreement is about the names.","What differs is the anchor. One version pins the bottom row to the wall that holds the main entrance and calls the doorway the Kan cell. The other pins the eight sectors to the compass and reads them off a luopan. Same nine words, different patch of floor. On a flat whose entrance wall faces north the two land close together. On one whose entrance wall faces south they are rotated half a turn and share nothing.",{"heading":21,"body":22,"bullets":23,"table":26},"A sector is exactly three mountains","The compass version is not arbitrary geometry. A circle divided among eight trigrams gives 45 degrees each, and the luopan's finer ring divides the same circle into 24 mountains of 15 degrees. Forty-five divided by fifteen is three, so every trigram sector is a named triple of mountains.",[24,25],"The middle mountain of each triple is the trigram itself; the two flanking ones carry the same direction at finer resolution. A compass reading is therefore never simply southeast, it is one of three mountains inside that southeast sector.","This is the part of the map that can be checked against an instrument, which is why it is worth knowing before arguing about which corner is the wealth corner.",{"headers":27,"rows":31},[28,29,30],"Sector","Degrees","Mountains",[32,36,40,44,48,52,56,60],[33,34,35],"Kan, north","337.5 to 22.5","Ren, Zi, Gui",[37,38,39],"Ken, northeast","22.5 to 67.5","Chou, Ken, Yin",[41,42,43],"Chen, east","67.5 to 112.5","Jia, Mao, Yi",[45,46,47],"Sun, southeast","112.5 to 157.5","Chen, Sun, Si",[49,50,51],"Li, south","157.5 to 202.5","Bing, Wu, Ding",[53,54,55],"Kun, southwest","202.5 to 247.5","Wei, Kun, Shen",[57,58,59],"Dui, west","247.5 to 292.5","Geng, You, Xin",[61,62,63],"Chien, northwest","292.5 to 337.5","Xu, Chien, Hai",{"heading":65,"body":66},"The ninth cell has no width",[67,68],"Eight sectors at 45 degrees come to 360 exactly. In the compass version the eight trigrams already cover the circle, so the centre has no angular extent at all: it has to be drawn as a radius you choose, or it is not a sector. In the grid version the centre is one of nine equal rectangles and holds 11.1 per cent of the floor.","The two therefore disagree about how much floor the centre gets before anyone places a single object. Sectors also hold more than cells: one eighth is 12.5 per cent against one ninth at 11.1, so each sector is 12.5 per cent larger than its grid counterpart. If a source says the centre is a ninth of the home, it is using the grid and not the compass.",{"heading":70,"body":71},"The door-aligned version is recent",[72,73,74],"The nine-cell overlay with the entrance at the bottom is not in the classical house manuals. The Zhaijing, the Han text that later manuals build on, treats a dwelling as a set of directional positions arranged around a centre and gives no grid of nine equal cells. The Eight Mansions manuals of the Qing reduce the house to three things — the door, the main room, the stove — and still settle them with a compass.","That is not an argument that one version is wrong. It is an argument that they answer different questions, and that a page telling a household to lay the bagua over the plan without saying which version has not given an instruction.","The practical question the door-aligned version forces is which wall counts. The answer has to be the wall with the main entrance rather than the door used most often, and awkward plans need a stated convention: take the largest rectangle that contains that entrance and accept that the rest of the plan is unmapped.",{"heading":76,"body":77,"bullets":78,"table":81},"When the two maps rotate, the overlap is arithmetic","Two sectors 45 degrees wide, offset by an angle, share the fraction (45 minus the offset) divided by 45 of their width. Nothing about the tradition is involved in that number; it is the geometry of two strips laid over each other.",[79,80],"A flat whose entrance wall faces 30 degrees off true north gives two maps whose southeast corners share a third of the same patch of floor. Past 45 degrees they share nothing at all.","That is the figure to quote when someone says the two systems broadly agree. They agree only where the entrance wall happens to face the same direction as the sector being read, which is a coincidence of the plan rather than a property of the method.",{"headers":82,"rows":85},[83,84],"Offset between the anchors","Shared floor",[86,89,92,95,98],[87,88],"0 degrees","100 per cent",[90,91],"15 degrees","66.7 per cent",[93,94],"22.5 degrees","50 per cent",[96,97],"30 degrees","33.3 per cent",[99,100],"45 degrees","none",{"heading":102,"body":103},"Three by three stops being ninths on a real plan",[104,105],"Take a flat 12 by 9 metres with a 3 by 2.5 metre notch cut out of one corner: 100.5 square metres net. Divide the bounding rectangle into nine and each cell is 4 by 3 metres, or 12 square metres. The notched corner cell now holds 4.5 square metres.","So one ninth of the home ranges from 4.5 to 12 square metres inside the same plan, a factor of 2.67, while the nominal ninth is 11.17. The labels stay in place and the areas stop matching them. A grid drawn with a tape on the actual floor avoids this; a printed grid stretched over a plan does not.",{"heading":107,"body":108},"How much of the reading is the instrument",[109,110],"Take five degrees as the working error. A phone magnetometer indoors will do that badly, and steel in the slab or a meter cupboard makes it worse. Every sector boundary is a knife edge with no width. Eight sectors mean eight boundaries, and a five-degree band around each covers 80 degrees of the circle, so about 22 per cent of all possible headings fall into a band where the reading is undecided. At mountain resolution the same error covers 240 degrees, or two thirds of the circle.","The heading is also measured against magnetic north while the tables assume true north. The difference is a published figure for a place and a date, and it is not a correction that care alone can remove. Record the bearing, the north you used, and the date; a sector name on its own cannot be reproduced by the next person who measures the same flat.",{"heading":112,"body":113},"What to do, and what neither map can tell you",[114,115,116],"Pick the version that matches the rest of the reading. Eight Mansions and flying stars both run on bearings, so the compass sectors feed them directly. A book that begins with the entrance at the bottom is using the grid, and mixing the two produces a plan where the wealth corner moves depending on which page you last read.","Write down three things when a sector is named: which version, what the reference edge was, and the date of the measurement. Those three make the claim reproducible, and reproducibility is the only part of this that can be checked at all.","Neither map measures daylight, damp, noise, storage, or a door that will not open fully. Those decide how a room is actually used, they can all be assessed in an afternoon, and where they conflict with a sector label the room wins.",[118,126],{"id":119,"kind":120,"title":121,"detail":122,"publisher":123,"url":124,"accessedAt":125},"huangdiZhaijing","traditional","Huangdi Zhaijing (黄帝宅经)","Historical context for traditional residential orientation and spatial vocabulary. Modern recommendations are judged against real conditions.","Wikisource digital text","https:\u002F\u002Fzh.wikisource.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E9%BB%83%E5%B8%9D%E5%AE%85%E7%B6%93","2026-07-14",{"id":127,"kind":128,"title":129,"detail":130,"publisher":131,"url":132,"accessedAt":125},"apaBarnumEffect","practical","APA Dictionary of Psychology: Barnum effect","A psychology reference for why broad, favourable personality descriptions can feel personally accurate. It does not evaluate BaZi calculations themselves.","American Psychological Association","https:\u002F\u002Fdictionary.apa.org\u002Fbarnum-effect",[134],"feng-shui-luo-pan",{"title":136,"description":137,"path":138,"type":139},"Bagua Map: Two Versions, Two Anchors","Two bagua maps share the same nine names and disagree about the anchor. Sector widths, a centre with no width, and the rotation at which they stop overlapping.","\u002Farticles\u002Fbagua-map-placement","article",{"src":141,"srcByLocale":142,"alt":144,"width":145,"height":146,"altByLocale":147,"captionByLocale":150},"\u002Fimg\u002Farticles\u002Fbagua-map-placement.svg",{"tw":143},"\u002Fimg\u002Farticles\u002Fbagua-map-placement-tw.svg","Two bagua maps compared by what each anchors to: the wall with the main door, or 45 degrees of the compass, which is exactly three of the 24 mountains.",1280,960,{"zh":148,"tw":149},"两版八卦图各自以什么为基准的对照：大门所在的那面墙，还是罗盘上的四十五度——而那正好是二十四山里的三山。","兩版八卦圖各自以什麼為基準的對照：大門所在的那面牆，還是羅盤上的四十五度——而那正好是二十四山裡的三山。",{"en":151,"zh":152,"tw":153},"The names are identical in both versions. What moves is the anchor, and with it the patch of floor each name refers to.","两版的卦名完全一样。移动的是基准，以及每个名字所指的那块地板。","兩版的卦名完全一樣。移動的是基準，以及每個名字所指的那塊地板。",{"topic":155,"articles":185,"tools":245},{"slug":8,"title":156,"eyebrow":157,"description":158,"relatedTools":159,"articleIdeas":160,"seo":165,"sections":169},"Eight Mansions Feng Shui","Ba Zhai feng shui","A working guide to Eight Mansions (Ba Zhai) feng shui: the personal ming gua, the house gua taken from a measured sitting direction, the eight-star table that joins them, and the three places the tradition actually reads.",[],[161,162,163,164],"Ming Gua Calculation","Four Auspicious Directions","Bed Placement by Eight Mansions","Room Selection by Personal Gua",{"title":166,"description":167,"path":168},"Eight Mansions Feng Shui Guide","Learn Eight Mansions feng shui: ming gua calculation, eight directions, favorable sectors, and practical home layout applications.","\u002Ftopics\u002Feight-mansions-feng-shui",[170,173,176,179,182],{"heading":171,"body":172},"What it is: two numbers, one table","Eight Mansions (Ba Zhai, 八宅) is the smallest complete system in feng shui. It needs two trigrams and nothing else. The gua of the person — the ming gua — is derived from the birth year and gender, with the year adjusted if the birthday falls before that year’s lunar new year. The gua of the house comes from its sitting direction, measured with a compass rather than assumed. Put the two side by side and the tradition hands back a fixed table: eight directions, each with a star already attached. There is no chart to draw, no period to look up, no star to fly. That smallness is the point, and it is also why the system gets claimed for far more than it does.",{"heading":174,"body":175},"The eight directions and what each one is for","The table always produces the same eight names. Four are read as favourable — Sheng Qi (生气), Tian Yi (天医), Yan Nian (延年), Fu Wei (伏位). Four are read as unfavourable — Jue Ming (绝命), Wu Gui (五鬼), Liu Sha (六煞), Huo Hai (祸害). Which direction receives which name depends entirely on the gua you started from, and the assignment is fixed by the Da You Nian song (大游年歌), a mnemonic that generates the whole table from a line of verse. Nothing in that process looks at your house, your health, or your year. It is arithmetic on a birth year and a compass bearing. Read the eight names as a vocabulary for ranking directions, and the system stops pretending to know things it was never built to know.",{"heading":177,"body":178},"East group or west group: which one are you","The eight gua split into two sets. Kan 1, Li 9, Zhen 3 and Xun 4 form the east group; Kun 2, Dui 7, Qian 6 and Gen 8 form the west group. An east-group person’s four favourable directions are the east-group directions, and the same holds on the west side. From that comes a claim you will hear often: east-group people should live in east-group houses. The underlying rule is real, but the veto is not. In a city flat you rarely choose the sitting direction, and a household of four frequently contains both groups. What the rule can honestly do is rank the rooms inside the house you already have.",{"heading":180,"body":181},"The three places that matter: door, bedroom, stove","Classical Ba Zhai is not a room-by-room audit. It reads three points — the door (门), the main bedroom (主) and the stove (灶) — and asks whether each sits in a favourable or unfavourable direction for the people who use it. The reason is historical. In the houses the system was built for, those three points were where household life actually happened, and surveying every square metre would have been wasted effort. Modern homes have more rooms and different routines, so keep the three-point habit as a way of setting priorities, then add the two or three rooms you genuinely spend hours in, and treat the rest as optional.",{"heading":183,"body":184},"When it doesn't help","Three limits are worth stating plainly. First, it ignores form: the road outside, the shape of the plot, a bedroom with no window. A favourable direction on a bad room is still a bad room. Second, it has no time dimension — unlike the flying star systems, Ba Zhai does not shift with the period or the year, so it cannot say anything about when. Third, the compass reading is the weak link: a phone compass, a steel door frame or a five-degree error can push a direction into the next sector and rename every entry in the table. Use Eight Mansions as a tie-breaker between layouts that already work, never as the reason to accept a layout that does not.",[186,198,209,220,232,242],{"slug":187,"title":188,"description":189,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":190,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":191,"updatedAt":192,"summary":193,"relatedTools":194,"seo":195},"ming-gua-calculation","Ming Gua: The Formula, and the Three Places It Breaks","Ming gua in one modular step: 2 minus the year for men, the year plus 4 for women, mod 9. The two-digit shorthand fails in all 100 years after 1999, and the fold at five doubles one gua.","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fminggua-jisuan-fangfa.html","2026-01-29","2026-11-01","The formula is a single modular step that needs no century correction. Every disagreement between published tables comes from a convention: an expired two-digit shorthand, a fold at five that gives one gua double weight, and a year boundary at 立春 that sits about seven days from the lunar new year.",[],{"title":188,"description":196,"path":197},"How a ming gua is calculated, why the two-digit shorthand fails after 1999, what happens to a result of five, and where the birth year actually starts.","\u002Farticles\u002Fming-gua-calculation",{"slug":199,"title":200,"description":201,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":202,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":203,"updatedAt":204,"summary":205,"relatedTools":206,"seo":207},"four-auspicious-directions","Four Auspicious Directions in Eight Mansions: The Verse and the Table","How the Da You Nian song turns one line of verse into eight directions: the reading order, a table for all eight gua, the rank order of the four favourable names, and what the table cannot decide.","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fsiji-xiangfang-jiangjie.html","2026-01-31","2026-10-29","The four favourable directions are generated rather than chosen. One verse, read around the eight palaces from your own trigram, produces the whole table — and the same table ranks the four, so you know which to drop first.",[],{"title":200,"description":201,"path":208},"\u002Farticles\u002Ffour-auspicious-directions",{"slug":210,"title":211,"description":212,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":213,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":214,"updatedAt":192,"summary":215,"relatedTools":216,"seo":217},"bed-placement-eight-mansions","Bed Placement: The Wall Comes First, the Direction Second","Bed placement in Eight Mansions is two decisions: which wall can take a headboard, then which favourable direction that wall gives. A worked example shows the conflict no table resolves.","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fbazhai-chuangwei-buju.html","2026-02-02","A solid headboard, a view of the door and no window overhead decide where the bed goes. The direction follows the headboard, so one wall can give two answers, and when two people share the bed their tables cross with no exchange rate between them.",[],{"title":211,"description":218,"path":219},"How Eight Mansions bed placement works once the wall is fixed: the four favourable directions, the position rules that come first, and a worked example with two people.","\u002Farticles\u002Fbed-placement-eight-mansions",{"slug":221,"title":222,"description":223,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":224,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":225,"updatedAt":226,"summary":227,"relatedTools":228,"seo":229},"room-selection-personal-gua","Room Selection by Personal Gua: Eight Mansions Guide","Compare room options using the traditional personal gua and house gua framework while accounting for daylight, ventilation, noise, access, area, and each household member's needs.","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fbazhai-fangjian-xuanze.html","2026-02-04","2026-10-17","Treat personal gua as one optional traditional preference, not a verdict on who should use a room. Compare practical conditions and household needs before making a choice.",[],{"title":222,"description":230,"path":231},"Learn how personal gua is used as one traditional room-selection reference alongside practical household requirements.","\u002Farticles\u002Froom-selection-personal-gua",{"slug":233,"title":234,"description":235,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":204,"updatedAt":204,"summary":236,"relatedTools":237,"seo":238},"how-to-measure-house-facing-direction","How to Measure Which Way Your Home Faces","Three methods for the one input every direction-based method needs: a phone compass, a noon shadow, and the building's own plan. Each fails in a different way, and the cheapest one fails most often indoors.","Sitting and facing are 180 degrees apart, so a home needs one measurement, not two. Eight sectors tolerate 22.5 degrees of error and twenty-four mountains tolerate 7.5, which decides whether a phone is enough. The page gives the four-reading test for a contaminated indoor compass, the solar-noon table for five cities, the plan method that ignores magnetism, and a worked case where 13 degrees flips the sector.",[134],{"title":239,"description":240,"path":241,"type":139},"How to Measure Your Home's Facing Direction","Measure the facing direction of a flat with a phone compass, a noon shadow, or the building plan. Includes the four-reading contamination test, solar noon times, and where 13 degrees changes the sector.","\u002Farticles\u002Fhow-to-measure-house-facing-direction",{"slug":4,"title":5,"description":6,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":11,"updatedAt":11,"summary":13,"relatedTools":243,"seo":244},[134],{"title":136,"description":137,"path":138,"type":139},[],{"articles":247},[248,262,274],{"slug":249,"title":250,"description":251,"category":252,"topicSlug":253,"legacyPath":254,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":255,"updatedAt":256,"summary":257,"relatedTools":258,"seo":259},"door-facing-door-feng-shui","Door Facing Door Feng Shui","Two doors face each other only when their openings overlap in plan. Measure the offset, then check what the axis actually carries: sight, air, sound, daylight.","Feng Shui Cures","home-feng-shui","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fmen-dui-men-huajie.html","2025-09-09","2026-10-28","Two 80 cm doors need 80 cm of offset before the openings stop overlapping, and that one number settles most hallway arguments. The axis carries sight, air, sound and daylight — only some of them are faults, and a through-draft is usually ventilation.",[134],{"title":260,"description":251,"path":261,"type":139},"Door Facing Door Feng Shui: Measure the Axis First","\u002Farticles\u002Fdoor-facing-door-feng-shui",{"slug":263,"title":264,"description":265,"category":252,"topicSlug":253,"legacyPath":266,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":267,"updatedAt":256,"summary":268,"relatedTools":269,"seo":270},"missing-corner-feng-shui","Missing Corner Feng Shui","Measure a floor plan against its enclosing rectangle, then read what the notch removed: a window wall, the entry, a bathroom vent, or nothing at all.","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Ffangwu-quejiao-huajie.html","2025-09-11","A so-called missing corner is an irregularity between a floor plan and its simplest enclosing rectangle. Measure the share of the rectangle that is absent and the depth of the notch against the room it cuts into; then check what the notch removed — a window wall, the entry, a bathroom vent, or only wall.",[134],{"title":271,"description":272,"path":273,"type":139},"Missing Corner Feng Shui: Measure the Notch First","Draw the enclosing rectangle, measure the absent share and the notch depth, then read what the notch removed. Mirrors come last, and usually not at all.","\u002Farticles\u002Fmissing-corner-feng-shui",{"slug":275,"title":276,"description":277,"category":252,"topicSlug":278,"legacyPath":279,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":280,"updatedAt":192,"summary":281,"relatedTools":282,"seo":283},"feng-shui-plants","Feng Shui Plants: What the Name Claims, What Actually Decides","Which feng shui plant claims survive a division. Six species with their light needs and pet toxicity, plus the air, oxygen and water arithmetic behind the symbolism.","feng-shui-cures","\u002Fpages\u002Farticles\u002Fzhaocai-zhiwu-tuijian.html","2025-09-13","The species name is the weakest variable in the list. Three measurable properties decide the outcome: daily light integral (2-4, 4-8 or 10+ mol), pet toxicity, and how much water the pot holds. The air-purifying claim needs about 2,200 plants to match one air change, and a bedroom plant covers 0.4% of one person's oxygen.",[134],{"title":284,"description":285,"path":286,"type":139},"Feng Shui Plants: Six Species and the Numbers Behind Them","Six common feng shui plants with their light requirements and pet toxicity, plus the air-purifying and bedroom oxygen claims worked out in grams.","\u002Farticles\u002Ffeng-shui-plants",1793614153781]