Palace 01 · Life Court
The Command Palace
命宮 · Ming Gong
Identity, destiny quality, core nature — the palace that sets the entire chart's tone.
Everything the wheel opens, one animal at the center
The Eastern wheel, your birth year's animal
The Western wheel, the sky on your birthday
The craft your Zodi Animal practices
五行 · featured system
The five phases that move through everything — now mapped to the seven chakras, each with its own yoga practice.
BaZi
Cast your charttoolWhat is BaZi八字 Bāzì · eight charactersYour Day Master日主 RìzhǔThe Ten Gods十神 ShíshénYou & themTwo skies, read together
The Moon overhead, its phases, and the path they light.
In Zi Wei Dou Shu, your life is not a timeline — it's a palace. Twelve chambers, each permanently furnished by the stars of your birth moment. Every domain of your life has a room: wealth, relationships, career, health, spiritual fortune, and more. The stars tell you who lives there.
No palace is ever read alone. Every room has three companions — that is the first law of palace reading.
A palace (宮, gōng) is not a time period or a personality trait — it is a permanent life domain, anchored to one of the 12 Earthly Branches at the foundation of your chart. Think of each palace as a room in a cosmic estate you were born into.
That room governs one dimension of your life: its furniture — the stars placed there at birth — never changes. But the room's lighting shifts decade by decade and year by year as the Four Forces cycle through.
Your job as a reader is never to ask "is this palace good or bad?" The question is: what stars live here, and what are the rooms around this one telling me?
This is the most important interpretive principle in all of Zi Wei Dou Shu. Every palace has a "court" of four palaces that are read as one unit. The court consists of: the palace itself, two palaces at four positions away in each direction (forming a triangle), and the directly opposite palace. A weak primary palace can be rescued by a strong court. A strong palace can be undermined by a damaged court. Click any palace below to see its court.
Select a palace above to see its court companions highlighted.
Life Palace + Celestial Treasury + Imperial Hall + World Stage — the most important court for overall destiny assessment. When reading anyone's chart, always start here.
Peer Circle + Constitution Map + Ancestral Foundation + Origin Gate — reveals material roots, physical constitution, family inheritance, and peer relationships.
Mirror of Union + World Stage + Soul Palace + Peer Circle — reads intimate bonds alongside the outer persona and spiritual quality. The inner and outer life of relationship.
Legacy Garden + Alliance Court + Origin Gate + Celestial Treasury — governs creative legacy, trusted allies, parental relationships, and the flow of wealth through generations.
Every palace has an opposite palace directly across the chart. This mirror exerts the strongest single companion influence of all. The six pairs reveal the fundamental tensions your chart holds.
In classical Zi Wei Dou Shu teaching, the Soul Palace (福德宮, Fu De Gong) is described as governing all eleven other palaces. This is a radical claim. It means: a person with a brilliant Career Palace but a damaged Soul Palace may achieve great success and feel hollow inside it. A person with a struggling Wealth Palace but a luminous Soul Palace may have little and feel completely whole.
The Soul Palace reveals whether a person can access genuine contentment — regardless of what the external palaces show. In any reading, if you lose track of everything else, come back to this one room. It is the one the ancients said governs all the others.
Each palace governs a permanent life domain. Click "Details" to see the life question this palace answers, its opposite palace, its court, and what happens when the Hook (化忌) lands here.
The stars in a palace are permanent — but the palace's energy is not static. Every decade and every year, the Four Forces (四化, Sì Huà) cycle through the chart. When a Force lands in a palace, it alters the energy of that room for the duration of that period.
The Celestial Court · every door in the hub
紫微斗數 Zǐwēi Dǒushù · known in English as Purple Star Astrology — the Emperor's system, mapped room by room below