[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":294},["ShallowReactive",2],{"article:how-to-measure-house-facing-direction:en":3,"article-topic:eight-mansions-feng-shui:en":161,"related-articles:en:eight-mansions-feng-shui:how-to-measure-house-facing-direction:feng-shui-luo-pan":253},{"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":140,"seo":142,"contentImage":147},"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.","Feng Shui","eight-mansions-feng-shui","","zhang-hao","2026-10-29",false,"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.",[15,20,56,61,66,97,102,107,112],{"heading":16,"body":17},"One bearing, and the wall you decide is the front",[18,19],"Every direction-based method needs the same input before it can say anything: the bearing the building faces. Sitting (坐) and facing (向) are 180 degrees apart, so this is one measurement, not two. Eight Mansions reads the house from its sitting direction; a flying-star chart needs the facing bearing and the year of construction. Get the bearing wrong and every number downstream is wrong in a way no amount of interpretation repairs.","What counts as the front is a convention rather than a fact. A flat offers at least three candidates: the wall with the largest window, the door you actually enter by, and the elevation the building is addressed from. The classical texts assume a free-standing house with one obvious facade, and a tower block has four. Pick the side with the largest opening to the outside on the addressed elevation, write down which wall you used, and use the same wall for every later reading. Switching walls midway is the most common way a household ends up with two contradictory charts of one home.",{"heading":21,"body":22,"table":25},"The method's tolerance decides the instrument",[23,24],"Both systems quantise direction, so both have a tolerance you can state in degrees. The eight-sector table used by Eight Mansions gives each sector 45 degrees, which means a reading can be wrong by up to 22.5 degrees and still land in the same sector. The twenty-four mountain ring on a luopan gives each mountain 15 degrees, so the tolerance there is 7.5 degrees.","That difference decides which instrument is adequate. A phone that is five degrees off is comfortable for the eight-sector table and marginal for the ring. The question is not which compass is better in general, but which table you are going to read afterwards.",{"headers":26,"rows":30},[27,28,29],"Sector","Degrees covered","Width",[31,35,38,41,44,47,50,53],[32,33,34],"North","337.5 - 22.5","45",[36,37,34],"Northeast","22.5 - 67.5",[39,40,34],"East","67.5 - 112.5",[42,43,34],"Southeast","112.5 - 157.5",[45,46,34],"South","157.5 - 202.5",[48,49,34],"Southwest","202.5 - 247.5",[51,52,34],"West","247.5 - 292.5",[54,55,34],"Northwest","292.5 - 337.5",{"heading":57,"body":58},"Why a phone compass struggles in a flat",[59,60],"A phone compass reads a magnetometer, and a magnetometer reads whatever magnetic field is present locally. Indoors, that field is mostly the building. Reinforcing bar in a floor slab is typically laid at 150 to 200 millimetre centres and sits directly under your feet; steel studs, metal door frames, radiators, speaker magnets and a magnetic phone case all add their own contribution.","The error is not a fixed offset that can be subtracted. It changes from one spot to the next, which is why two readings a metre apart can disagree by more than the width of a mountain. The practical test is four readings at least a metre apart, at chest height, with the phone flat and its top edge pointed the same way each time. If all four agree within five degrees, average them and keep the number. If they spread further than that, the readings are contaminated: step outside, onto a balcony, or into the doorway, where the slab is thinner or absent, and take the reading again.",{"heading":62,"body":63},"Magnetic north, true north, and which one the table expects",[64,65],"A compass points at magnetic north; maps and satellite images are drawn to true north. The gap between them is declination, which in mainland China runs from roughly ten degrees west in the northeast to a few degrees east in Xinjiang, close to zero through parts of Sichuan and Yunnan, and drifts by about a tenth of a degree a year. For a bearing in Beijing, six or seven degrees is the order of magnitude.","Here is the part that surprises people: correcting to true north is not automatically the more correct choice. The luopan is a magnetic instrument and the classical tables were built on magnetic bearings, so a modern true-north correction can move a reading away from the convention the table assumes. What matters is consistency. State which north you used, and use the same one when you re-measure. If the bearing is more than ten degrees from a sector boundary, the distinction cannot change the answer; if it is closer than that, say so instead of silently picking one.",{"heading":67,"body":68,"table":71},"The noon shadow, which needs no instrument at all",[69,70],"At local solar noon the sun crosses the meridian due south anywhere north of the Tropic of Cancer, so the shadow of any upright object points true north. A stick, a sunny ten minutes and a mark on the ground give a true-north line that no steel can distort.","The one thing to get right is the time. Solar noon is not clock noon. China keeps UTC+8, the meridian of 120 degrees east, so every place west of that line has a later noon, and the equation of time adds or subtracts up to about sixteen minutes on top. In late October the correction is near its maximum, which is why the table below spreads over two and a half hours.",{"headers":72,"rows":76},[73,74,75],"City","Solar noon, 29 October","Shadow per metre of height",[77,81,85,89,93],[78,79,80],"Harbin","11:18","1.65 m",[82,83,84],"Beijing","11:58","1.32 m",[86,87,88],"Shanghai","11:38","0.98 m",[90,91,92],"Guangzhou","12:11","0.73 m",[94,95,96],"Urumqi","13:53","1.53 m",{"heading":98,"body":99},"How accurate the shadow actually is",[100,101],"Near noon the shadow turns slowly, which is what makes the method usable with an ordinary clock. At the latitude of Beijing in late October the shadow swings about 0.3 degrees per minute of clock error: five minutes off is 1.5 degrees, ten minutes is 3 degrees. A phone clock is accurate to the second, so the practical error is set by how well you mark the tip, not by the timing.","The method fails in three situations, and each is visible before you start. Overcast weather removes the shadow entirely. A sun too high to cast a usable shadow does the same: in Guangzhou on 21 June the noon sun stands at 90.3 degrees and the shadow disappears under the object. And a surface that is not level tilts the line you draw, so use a hard, flat surface rather than grass.",{"heading":103,"body":104},"The plan method, which ignores magnetism",[105,106],"For a flat, the most reliable reading is often taken from a drawing rather than from the air. Open a satellite view of the building, note which way north is on the image, mark the wall you decided is the front, and measure the angle between that wall's outward normal and north. The result is a true-north bearing with no magnetic component at all, and rebar cannot touch it.","Its failure mode is different: the answer is only as good as the wall you picked and the accuracy of the footprint. Use it as a cross-check rather than a replacement. If the phone and the plan disagree by more than ten degrees, one of them is wrong, and it is usually the phone. If they agree within five degrees, you have the number and you can stop measuring.",{"heading":108,"body":109},"Where thirteen degrees changes the answer",[110,111],"Take a flat whose living-room window faces 118 degrees while the building's main elevation faces 105 degrees. To the eye both are east-southeast. On the eight-sector table, 105 degrees falls in East, which ends at 112.5, and 118 degrees falls in Southeast. Under Eight Mansions those two sectors carry different stars, so the whole reading flips on thirteen degrees of measurement. On the twenty-four mountain ring the same gap crosses from 乙 to 辰.","This is the argument for writing the number down instead of the word. East is not an input any table can use, and a bearing recorded without its method cannot be reproduced by the next person who measures the same home.",{"heading":113,"body":114},"What the bearing does not decide",[115,116],"The bearing is one input among several, and it is not a verdict on the home. It does not outrank daylight, damp, noise, a door that will not open fully, or a room nobody wants to sit in. Where a traditional preference and a measurable condition disagree, the condition comes first, and the bearing can wait.","It also does not settle disagreements between systems. If Eight Mansions calls a room favourable and the flying-star chart calls it hostile, no rule inside either system resolves the conflict; they are different tables applied to the same wall. Record the bearing, the method used to get it, and the date. A number without its method is a claim, not a measurement.",[118,126,134],{"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":133},"noaaSolarCalculator","practical","NOAA Solar Calculator","Used to check local solar noon and the equation of time, which is the part the true-solar-time correction adds to or subtracts from clock time.","NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory","https:\u002F\u002Fgml.noaa.gov\u002Fgrad\u002Fsolcalc\u002F","2026-10-16",{"id":135,"kind":128,"title":136,"detail":137,"publisher":138,"url":139,"accessedAt":133},"ianaTimeZones","IANA Time Zone Database (tzdata)","The reference dataset for historical UTC offsets and daylight-saving transitions. Its Asia\u002FShanghai rules are the source for the 1986–1991 China summer-time dates used above.","Internet Assigned Numbers Authority","https:\u002F\u002Fiana.org\u002Ftime-zones",[141],"feng-shui-luo-pan",{"title":143,"description":144,"path":145,"type":146},"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","article",{"src":148,"srcByLocale":149,"alt":151,"width":152,"height":153,"altByLocale":154,"captionByLocale":157},"\u002Fimg\u002Farticles\u002Fhow-to-measure-house-facing-direction.svg",{"tw":150},"\u002Fimg\u002Farticles\u002Fhow-to-measure-house-facing-direction-tw.svg","Three ways to measure a home facing direction, set side by side with what each one needs and how each one fails: a phone compass, a noon shadow, and the building plan.",1280,960,{"zh":155,"tw":156},"三种测朝向的方法并排：手机罗盘、正午影子、楼房平面图，各自需要什么、又各自怎么失效。","三種測朝向的方法並排：手機羅盤、正午影子、樓房平面圖，各自需要什麼、又各自怎麼失效。",{"en":158,"zh":159,"tw":160},"The cheapest method is the one that fails indoors. A noon shadow and a plan both ignore the steel in the slab.","最便宜的那种方法，恰恰是在室内最常出错的那种。正午影子和平面图都不受楼板钢筋影响。","最便宜的那種方法，恰恰是在室內最常出錯的那種。正午影子和平面圖都不受樓板鋼筋影響。",{"topic":162,"articles":192,"tools":252},{"slug":8,"title":163,"eyebrow":164,"description":165,"relatedTools":166,"articleIdeas":167,"seo":172,"sections":176},"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.",[],[168,169,170,171],"Ming Gua Calculation","Four Auspicious Directions","Bed Placement by Eight Mansions","Room Selection by Personal Gua",{"title":173,"description":174,"path":175},"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",[177,180,183,186,189],{"heading":178,"body":179},"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":181,"body":182},"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":184,"body":185},"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":187,"body":188},"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":190,"body":191},"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.",[193,205,215,226,238,241],{"slug":194,"title":195,"description":196,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":197,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":198,"updatedAt":199,"summary":200,"relatedTools":201,"seo":202},"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":195,"description":203,"path":204},"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":206,"title":207,"description":208,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":209,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":210,"updatedAt":11,"summary":211,"relatedTools":212,"seo":213},"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","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":207,"description":208,"path":214},"\u002Farticles\u002Ffour-auspicious-directions",{"slug":216,"title":217,"description":218,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":219,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":220,"updatedAt":199,"summary":221,"relatedTools":222,"seo":223},"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":217,"description":224,"path":225},"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":227,"title":228,"description":229,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":230,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":231,"updatedAt":232,"summary":233,"relatedTools":234,"seo":235},"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":228,"description":236,"path":237},"Learn how personal gua is used as one traditional room-selection reference alongside practical household requirements.","\u002Farticles\u002Froom-selection-personal-gua",{"slug":4,"title":5,"description":6,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":11,"updatedAt":11,"summary":13,"relatedTools":239,"seo":240},[141],{"title":143,"description":144,"path":145,"type":146},{"slug":242,"title":243,"description":244,"category":7,"topicSlug":8,"legacyPath":9,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":245,"updatedAt":245,"summary":246,"relatedTools":247,"seo":248},"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.","2026-10-31","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.",[141],{"title":249,"description":250,"path":251,"type":146},"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",[],{"articles":254},[255,269,281],{"slug":256,"title":257,"description":258,"category":259,"topicSlug":260,"legacyPath":261,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":262,"updatedAt":263,"summary":264,"relatedTools":265,"seo":266},"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.",[141],{"title":267,"description":258,"path":268,"type":146},"Door Facing Door Feng Shui: Measure the Axis First","\u002Farticles\u002Fdoor-facing-door-feng-shui",{"slug":270,"title":271,"description":272,"category":259,"topicSlug":260,"legacyPath":273,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":274,"updatedAt":263,"summary":275,"relatedTools":276,"seo":277},"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.",[141],{"title":278,"description":279,"path":280,"type":146},"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":282,"title":283,"description":284,"category":259,"topicSlug":285,"legacyPath":286,"authorId":10,"publishedAt":287,"updatedAt":199,"summary":288,"relatedTools":289,"seo":290},"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.",[141],{"title":291,"description":292,"path":293,"type":146},"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",1793614153755]