An old chart system, given the editorial treatment it was never offered in English.

What we are

Ming Review is a chart assessment service built like a small magazine. We do not sell fortune-telling, and we do not sell algorithm output. We sell readings that a named editor has reviewed, computed to astronomical precision, with the classical sources left visible instead of quietly absorbed into confident prose.

The system we work in plots fourteen major stars and dozens of auxiliaries across twelve life palaces, fixed at the moment of your birth and read against the year's moving stars. It is one of the most computationally structured divination systems in the world — which means it responds unusually well to being done carefully.

What we are not

We are not masters, gurus, or mediums. Nothing here is medical, legal, or financial advice. We are not a horoscope column — a generic zodiac paragraph averages twelve signs and reads all of them equally; a Zi Wei chart is drawn from your own birth data and reads differently for every person, which is precisely why we bother. And we are not an app that hides its logic: the calculation layer is the part we show off, not the part we conceal.

Why English, why now

The English-speaking world knows its own astrology well and Chinese metaphysics barely at all — the existing tools are either machine-translated, unsourced, or both. Meanwhile the classical corpus has already been digitized with scholarly care. What was missing was the middle layer: someone to compute correctly, translate faithfully, and stand behind the result with a byline. That is a job an editor can do.

Our readers are mostly curious Westerners meeting the system for the first time, alongside the Southeast Asian diaspora who grew up hearing about it at the dinner table. We write for both at once: rigorous enough for the second group, legible enough for the first.

The four things we do differently

• Precision as respect. True solar time, IANA time-zone corrections, solar-term boundaries to the minute. A chart computed sloppily is not a cheaper reading; it is someone else's reading.
• The transparency layer. Every published claim carries its classical citation and its review status as a visible badge. The homework is part of the product.
• A corpus, not a chatbot. Interpretations render from a curated 674,976-chart classical corpus, not from an model improvising in the moment. When the machine drafts, the corpus is the leash.
• A person answers for it. The byline is real and accountable — see the editor.

What it costs

Drawing a chart is free and stays free. Annual guides — like the Horse Year 2026 guide — are free. The deep, thirteen-theme Purple Star Report will be paid, priced plainly, once our quality calibration finishes. There are no subscriptions to the tool itself and no upsells inside a reading. An editorial desk charges for the article, not the air around it.