Computed like an almanac, sourced like a journal, edited like a magazine.

Step one — the sky, corrected

Your birth certificate records civil clock time. Your chart answers to solar time at your exact longitude. We convert every submission through the IANA time-zone database, which is the only trustworthy record of the world's daylight-saving eccentricities — including the years Beijing ran summer time (1986–1991), a window in which a careless tool silently shifts every chart by an hour. Longitude correction can push a birth moment across the boundary of a two-hour pillar. When it does, we report the corrected pillar, and we show you both.

Step two — pillars by the solar terms, not the festival

In the orthodox school of Chinese calendrics, the year pillar does not turn at Lunar New Year. It turns at Lìchūn — Start of Spring, a solar term that falls on February 3 or 4, weeks before the festival. The month pillars turn at the twelve solar terms (jié), not at the first of each lunar month.

Our calculation engine computes the solar-term boundaries to the minute with astronomical tables. We then check its month and year pillars against an independent lunar-calendar boundary, because some classical software — our own included — resolves pillar boundaries by the lunar calendar in places. When the two calendars disagree about your pillars, you see both, with a footnote saying which window you were born in: the year window (Spring Festival to Start of Spring) or a month window near a solar-term cusp. A reading that hides this disagreement is guessing on your behalf. We consider that rude.

Step three — the late-hours rule, handled honestly

Births between 23:00 and 24:00 sit in the disputed “late Rat hour.” One school moves the day pillar forward at 23:00; another waits until midnight. We verified against the classical engine's behaviour that the two schools produce identical results for our calculations, so we resolve late-Rat requests by the engine's own aliasing rather than a special-case path — and where a user's school would disagree, the transparency layer says so in a footnote.

Step four — the palace grid

The twelve palaces (Life, Siblings, Marriage, Children, Wealth, Health, Travel, Friends, Career, Property, Spirit, Parents) are fixed from your corrected birth data, and the fourteen major stars are placed by the classical brightness tables. Where the classical sources disagree about a star's brightness — and a few do — the engine's table is our authority, chosen once, in writing, so the decision is never made ad hoc inside a single reading.

Star temperaments follow the Complete Book of Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗數全書); annual verses follow the Marrow Classic (骨髓賦) tradition. When we translate a classical line, we translate it — we do not paraphrase it into something more exciting.

Step five — the corpus, and the transparency layer

Interpretations render from a curated corpus of 674,976 chart readings across thirteen themes — one of the largest structured bodies of Zi Wei interpretation ever assembled — localized into English with a controlled glossary, so the Innocent stays the Innocent and the Strategist stays the Strategist in every paragraph.

Every passage carries one of three badges. Citation — the classical line it renders from, quoted. Review status — machine-repaired (flagged with a checkmark and the repair noted), queued for human review, or editor-signed. Calendar footnote — the dual-calendar notice from step two, wherever it applies. If a passage has no badge, it does not ship.

Step six — the desk

Drafts are assembled by machine, then a human editor works the queue: repairs are confirmed or reverted, flagged passages are re-checked against the classical source, and only then does the report carry the byline. The health and temperament themes are written in a wellness register throughout — tradition is quoted as tradition, rhythms and self-care are suggested as suggestions, and every such passage carries its “see a qualified practitioner” valve. Nothing we publish predicts illness, loss, or death.

Step seven — what we do with your data

As little as possible. A free chart is computed in your browser and leaves your device only if you ask us to keep it. Stored charts and reports require explicit consent, can be exported, and can be deleted by you at any time — the details live on our privacy page. The short version: the reading is yours; the responsibility for it is ours.