The Twelve Palaces  ·  十二宮 Shí'èr Gōng  ·  Palace 10
田宅宮
Tián Zhái Gōng

The Property Palace · The Ancestral Foundation

Property Palace  ·  Fixed assets and the home  ·  Palace 10 of 12

Home and property Land and real estate The household A stable base

The Property Palace is the room of the home and everything fixed a person holds: the house, the land, the family base, and the walls a life is lived inside.

The name, character by character

Three characters: 田, 宅, and 宮

The palace name is written 田宅宮 tián zhái gōng. Take the three characters apart and the name stops being a label and starts telling you what the room is for.

tián
Meaning
Field, farmland, cultivated land. A worked plot of ground, and by extension land held as property.
Components
A single clean shape: an outer border wéi drawn around a cross shí inside it.
Origin
田 (tián) is one of the tidiest pictographs in the whole script. It draws a field seen from above: a square of ground split by paths into smaller plots, with the raised ridges that divided farmland shown as the cross inside the border. What you see is what it means. Over time it widened from a single field to land and property in general, and it still sits inside everyday words for farmland and rice paddy.
zhái
Meaning
Residence, dwelling, house. The place a person lives, a home rather than a passing shelter.
Components
The roof radical mián sits on top, over a lower part tuō that supplies the sound.
Origin
宅 (zhái) is a phono-semantic compound. The roof mián on top carries the meaning, a building people live under, while the lower part 乇 (tuō) is there mainly for its sound. From early on it named a residence or a homestead, the fixed dwelling a family kept, and it still does, in ordinary words for a house and a home. Where 田 (tián) is the land, 宅 (zhái) is the roof raised on it.
gōng
Meaning
Palace, hall, or chamber. The same character names a real imperial palace and, more plainly, a room inside a building.
Components
The roof radical mián covers the top. Under it sits a lower part traditionally read as , two small enclosed shapes stacked together.
Origin
宮 (gōng) is usually explained as a picture of a roof with several connected rooms beneath it, that is, many chambers under one roof, which is what set a palace apart from an ordinary house. Some sources read the lower shapes as connected rooms and others as windows or openings, so the fine detail is not fully settled, but the shared idea is a large sheltered building divided into rooms.

Put the three together and 田宅宮 tián zhái gōng reads, character by character, as the palace of 田 (tián) and 宅 (zhái): the room of field and dwelling, land and house. Every one of the twelve palaces ends in 宮 (gōng), one room of the chart. The characters in front say which room, and here they name the ground under a life and the home built on it.

What it governs

The room of home and property

The Property Palace covers the fixed base of a life: the home a person lives in, the land and buildings they hold, and the sense of a settled place to stand.

In plain reading terms, this palace answers where a person is rooted. The stars here describe the home and the household around it: whether property comes and goes or settles and grows, the kind of place someone is drawn to live in, and how safe the base beneath them feels. It takes in real estate, land, and the family home, and by an old extension the storehouse where wealth is kept rather than the coins that move through the hand.

Because a home is also where a family gathers, the Property Palace carries the household as well as the building: who lives under the roof, the atmosphere inside it, and how well the place holds a family together. A strong Property Palace reads as a secure base to return to; a troubled one reads as a home that is hard to keep or a base that keeps shifting.

A useful shorthand from the tradition: the Property Palace is the storehouse of a chart, the room that shows what a life can hold on to and keep.
How it is read

What a reader actually looks at

Reading the Property Palace follows the same short routine as any room, with one habit of its own: it is always weighed against the Wealth palace, because the two split a person's money between them.

  1. The star seated here. Find which of the major stars sits in the Property Palace. That star is the main description of the home and the holdings: whether property is grand or plain, steady or restless, easy to keep or easy to lose. If two stars share the room, you read them as a pair.
  2. Its brightness. Each star has a strength level for the position it lands in. A bright star here reads as property that settles and grows; a dim one reads as a base that is harder to build or to hold. Brightness tells you how the holdings behave, not simply whether they are good or bad.
  3. Fixed against movable. The Property Palace is the fixed half of a person's material life: land, buildings, the home, the storehouse. Its natural partner is 財帛宮 cái bó gōng, the Wealth palace, the movable half: cash, income, the money that flows in and out. A reader compares the two. Strong here and weak there points to someone who holds assets rather than spends; the reverse points to money that moves quickly and settles into little. This palace is also read as the vault the Wealth palace pays into, so where earnings finally come to rest is read here.
  4. The opposite palace and the court. Directly across the chart sits 子女宮 zǐ nǚ gōng, the Children palace, which shines back across the axis. Two more rooms trine it four positions away on each side: 兄弟宮 xiōng dì gōng (Siblings) and 疾厄宮 jí è gōng (Health). Those three plus the Property Palace form the court, called 三方四正 sān fāng sì zhèng. The home is judged with them, never on its own.
This is a page for learning the reading, not a calculator. To find which star sits in your own Property Palace you cast a chart, which the handoff at the foot of this page links to.
What if…

Different stars in the Property Palace

Here are five worked examples of what a reader might say when a given star sits in the Property Palace. Treat each as a starting sketch, not a verdict: brightness and the court can shift any of them a long way.

太陰tài yīnThe Moon here

太陰 (tài yīn), the Moon, is traditionally the star most closely tied to home and property, so in the Property Palace it reads as a natural fit: a warm, settled home, an eye for a good house, and a tendency to hold and quietly build real estate over time.

Brightness matters more than usual here. A bright Moon reads as property that grows and a home that feels calm; a dim one reads as worry over the home or holdings that are harder to keep, so the strength level is the first thing a reader checks.

Read the 太陰 tài yīn star page

武曲wǔ qūThe Finance General here

武曲 (wǔ qū), the finance general and a decisive metal star, in the Property Palace reads as someone who acquires and keeps: property bought with intent, holdings built through effort and thrift rather than luck. It often points to real estate as the place earnings are parked.

The same firmness can read as a home run strictly or a base defended a little too hard, so a reader checks the court to see whether the holdings feel solid or clenched.

Read the 武曲 wǔ qū star page

天府tiān fǔThe Treasury here

天府 (tiān fǔ), the Treasury star, is a storehouse by nature, so in the Property Palace it reads as stable, well-kept holdings and a home that serves as a safe base. This is a person who tends to accumulate steadily and is slow to risk the roof over their head.

A reader watches for it turning overly cautious, a base so guarded that nothing is ever ventured, but the baseline reading here is security and a place that keeps.

Read the 天府 tiān fǔ star page

破軍pò jūnThe Vanguard here

破軍 (pò jūn), the Vanguard, tears down and rebuilds, so in the Property Palace it reads as change: moves, renovations, property bought and sold, a home remade more than once. It rarely means a base that sits still for decades.

Handled well it reads as upgrading and renewal; handled badly, as an unsettled home, so a reader leans on the brightness and the court to tell which way it runs.

Read the 破軍 pò jūn star page

An empty Property Palace

Some charts have no major star in the Property Palace at all. Rather than read an empty room, the tradition borrows the stars sitting in the opposite palace, 子女宮 zǐ nǚ gōng (Children), and reads them into the home and the holdings.

In plain words, an empty Property Palace often points to a base shaped by circumstance and by the people around it more than by one fixed pattern of its own. It can read as a home that changes with the seasons of a life rather than a single fixed address, and it makes the opposite palace and the wider court matter even more than usual.

See the opposite palace, 子女宮 Zǐ Nǚ Gōng

See all fourteen major stars, side by side

How Chinese readers think about it

Land, house, and the family base

In Chinese thought the home is not just where you sleep. It is the root of a family and the proof of a settled life, and this palace carries all of that weight.

The two characters say it plainly. 田 (tián) is farmland, the land a family works and passes down; 宅 (zhái) is the dwelling raised on it. Together they name the oldest form of security there is, a piece of ground and a roof. For most of Chinese history land and a home were exactly what a family hoped to hold and hand on, so to have 田宅 tián zhái was to be rooted, and to lose it was to be adrift.

This is why the Property Palace is read as more than a real estate report. A home is where the ancestors are remembered, where a family gathers, and where its fortunes are stored, so the site name for this room, the Ancestral Foundation, is fair to the tradition. The same instinct runs through 風水 fēng shuǐ, the care taken over where a house sits and how it is arranged, because the home was understood to shape the family living inside it.

And because 宮 (gōng) is a room, the framing stays concrete rather than abstract. Property is not a number on a page. It is a place you can stand in, a threshold you cross, and a base you return to, and in this system a life is read partly by the ground it manages to hold.

Its court

The three palaces read with it

The Property Palace is never read alone. Three other rooms are always read with it: the opposite palace and the two triangle partners. Together they make the court, 三方四正 sān fāng sì zhèng. These palace pages are being built; the links point to them.

Cast your chart and read your own Property Palace

Once you know which star sits in your Property Palace, its brightness, and how it weighs against your Wealth palace, everything on this page becomes a reading of your own home and holdings rather than a lesson.

Cast your chart