About KnowYourBaZi

Last updated: October 6, 2026

KnowYourBaZi is a free online site for Chinese metaphysics, run and maintained by one person, Haiyuan (海淵). The articles, plain-language explanations and translations on the site are mainly generated by AI; I choose the topics and the rules of interpretation, organize the content and fix the mistakes readers point out (see "How the Content Is Produced" below). My aim is to take the hard-to-follow terms of traditional Chinese metaphysics and lay them out in plain language that you can look up and learn, so that anyone curious about their own chart can cast it themselves, understand it and put it to use.

What This Site Offers

The English site has four sections, matching the menu at the top of the page:

• BaZi: a free chart, an in-depth reading and BaZi compatibility; guides to the stems and branches, the Five Elements, the Ten Gods and symbolic stars, Day Master strength, favorable elements, chart structures and seasonal adjustment; topics such as career and wealth, relationships and family, and Luck Pillars and annual years; and the charts of 43 well-known people as worked examples. The in-depth reading covers 12 areas of life plus your Luck Pillars and annual years, and is also calculated in your browser.
• Zi Wei: San He school Zi Wei Dou Shu charts; the fourteen major stars, the six auspicious and six malefic stars, the twelve palaces, the birth-year and flying-star transformations, and Zi Wei chart patterns.
• Astrology: Western birth charts with an in-depth reading, synastry, transits, solar returns and secondary progressions; the twelve signs, planets in signs and houses, and aspect readings; how a BaZi chart lines up with a birth chart; and Chinese and Western constellations.
• Almanac & More: the daily almanac, a lunar calendar converter, the twenty-four solar terms, date selection and deities' birthdays; the full text and plain-language meaning of four sets of temple fortune poems (the sixty Jiazi poems, Guanyin, Mazu and Yue Lao); the Chinese zodiac, name analysis and numerology; and Eight Mansions and the Nine Periods.

The Chinese editions also have a fifth section, Taoist Classics, with collated texts and plain-language readings of scriptures such as the Taishang Ganying Pian (太上感應篇) and the Qingjing Jing (清靜經). It is available in Chinese only for now.

My Principles

• Privacy first: every chart calculation runs locally in your browser. When you are not signed in, your birthday, name and other details are never uploaded. Only the birth details and charts a member chooses to save are kept on this site, and they can be deleted at any time.
• Plain language first: less jargon, more everyday speech. When a term is hard to follow, I do my best to break it down.
• Continually updated: content is expanded and revised over time based on reader feedback.
• Open about the method: what time the day changes during the Zi hour, how Day Master strength is scored, how favorable elements are picked. It is all written up in the methodology, with weight tables and a worked example. You are welcome to check it against your own results.

How the Content Is Produced

To put it plainly: the articles, explanations and translations on this site are mainly generated by AI (Anthropic's Claude), drawing heavily on material publicly available online, and the chart software was also written with AI help. Here is where each kind of content comes from:

• Calculated by the engine: chart results, the in-depth reading, compatibility, the almanac, solar-term times and every lookup tool are computed in your browser by fixed rules. Figures such as "about a third of people have this" are also counted by the same engine across large samples of charts.
• Assembled from templates: pages that come in large sets, such as the sixty day pillars, planets in houses and aspects, Zi Wei stars in each palace, zodiac year tables and deity birthday dates, are built from one set of written explanations combined with each page's own facts (stems and branches, stars, dates). Pages like these share sentence patterns, and the most repetitive of them are set not to be indexed by search engines, leaving the overview pages and lookup tools.
• Generated by AI: the topic articles, the plain-language versions of the classical texts and fortune poems, the celebrity chart write-ups, and the English, Japanese and Korean editions are written by AI from material publicly available online, then organized and selected by me. The Simplified Chinese edition is converted from Traditional Chinese by software.
• Checks before release: the chart software must first pass the cross-checks described under "How the Site Is Made", and before each release, scripts also check wording, formatting and titles.

I have no formal training under a teacher in these arts. I am simply interested in these traditions and have organized what I have read into a website, so please treat the readings here as entertainment and do not rely on them for major decisions. If you are a teacher willing to point out mistakes or offer corrections, please write to me; I will check each one and correct it.

How the Site Is Made

Casting a chart is arithmetic, and a wrong result does not announce itself. Classical texts and fortune poems have been copied by hand for generations, and a copying error does not announce itself either. So each chart engine is checked against an independent reference, and each source text is compared across at least two versions. These are the checks actually carried out.

Charts and calculations

• The Four Pillars: compared chart by chart against the hand-calculation formulas, 32,565 charts in all, with no differences. The pillars and solar-term boundaries are calculated with the open-source calendar library lunar-javascript, and the Twelve Life Stages table was checked cell by cell against that library, with all 120 cells matching.
• Solar term times: all 4,800 solar terms from 1901 to 2100 compared with the Sun's ecliptic longitude as solved by the astronomy library astronomy-engine; the largest gap is 62 seconds.
• Zi Wei Dou Shu: compared item by item with the open-source chart program iztro across twenty thousand random charts, with identical results.
• Western charts: planetary positions are calculated with astronomy-engine and compared chart by chart with two independent ephemeris implementations, agreeing within 0.01° (0.04° for the Moon); Placidus cusps are verified one by one from the definition.
• Eight Mansions directions: derived from the line-changing rule of the Great Wandering Year (大遊年), then cross-checked against the traditional mnemonic verses.
• Name analysis stroke counts: Kangxi stroke counts are derived from the radical and stroke data in Unicode Unihan, then spot-checked against 36 common surnames.
• Percentages in articles: figures such as "what share of people have this" are computed by running the engines over large numbers of charts, not written from impression.

Source texts and data

• Qiong Tong Bao Jian (窮通寶鑑): all 120 cells checked against the original. Quotations follow the edition on Wikisource and were compared line by line with another common edition; where the widely circulated summary tables differ from the original, the page says so.
• Fortune poems: every set of poems has been compared poem by poem across several circulating versions; the Yue Lao poems were compared across three circulating versions and then checked line by line against the original classics they quote, such as the Book of Songs, the Four Books, the Zuo Zhuan and Romance of the Western Chamber, with every corrected character noted on the page.
• Taoist scriptures (Chinese editions): each text has one base edition (the Wikisource text, the Zhengtong Daozang text or the common edition), collated line by line with other editions, with the differences listed under "Versions and collation" on each page.
• Celebrity charts: birth times follow birth certificates, birth registrations and similar records, with reliability noted on the internationally used Rodden Rating scale (AA, A, B, C, DD, X); where the hour is unknown or disputed, the chart is cast for all twelve two-hour periods to see whether the conclusion changes.

Classics and Sources

Every rule of interpretation on this site has a source; none of it is a system of my own invention. By topic, the site relies mainly on:

• Chart structures: Ziping Zhenquan (子平真詮), which takes the structure from the month branch and sets out what completes or breaks it.
• The nature of the ten Heavenly Stems: the discussion of the ten stems in Di Tian Sui (滴天髓), with reference to Di Tian Sui Chanwei (滴天髓闡微).
• Seasonal adjustment: Qiong Tong Bao Jian (窮通寶鑑, also called Lan Jiang Wang 欄江網), which pairs each stem with each of the twelve months.
• The illness-and-remedy approach: Shenfeng Tongkao (神峰通考) by Zhang Nan of the Ming dynasty.
• Classical texts on the sixty Jiazi: Sanming Tonghui (三命通會) by Wan Minying of the Ming dynasty.
• Zi Wei Dou Shu: the San He school, with stars placed according to Ziwei Doushu Quanshu (紫微斗數全書).
• Western birth charts: the tropical zodiac, Placidus houses and the true node, the common practice in modern astrology; planetary positions from astronomy-engine.
• Almanac and date selection: the traditional almanac rules for favorable and unfavorable activities, the twelve day officers, the yellow-path days and clashes, calculated with lunar-javascript. Printed almanacs from different publishers sometimes differ.
• The twenty-four solar terms: times from astronomical calculation; the seventy-two pentads follow the common edition of the Yuan-dynasty Yueling Qishier Hou Jijie (月令七十二候集解).
• Eight Mansions: the line-changing rule of the Great Wandering Year and the traditional mnemonic verses.
• Name analysis: Kumasaki Kenō's five-grid method and the 81 numbers; stroke counts restored from Kangxi radicals, with the character table compiled from Unicode Unihan data.
• Fortune poems: the Guanyin, sixty Jiazi and Mazu poems are compared across several circulating versions; the Yue Lao poems are mostly lines from classics such as the Book of Songs, the Four Books, the Zuo Zhuan and Romance of the Western Chamber.
• Taoist scriptures: the Wikisource texts, the Zhengtong Daozang (正統道藏) and the Daozang Jiyao (道藏輯要), collated against commentaries such as the Taishang Ganying Pian Jizhu (太上感應篇集註).
• Birth data of well-known people: birth certificates, official records, authorized biographies and similar, with reliability given on the Rodden Rating scale.

Where schools disagree (when the day changes during the Zi hour, whether to use true solar time, how the Life Palace is found), the page sets the views side by side and then says which one this site uses. I do not present a single answer as settled.

If You Find a Mistake

There is a great deal of material here, and some of it will be wrong. If you find an error in a chart result, a quoted text or an article, write to [email protected] or use the contact page; including the birth data or the page address makes it easier to trace. I check it against the original text and the engine and correct it if it is wrong. The "Updated" date under each page title reflects the last real change to that page's content.

What This Site Does Not Do

• No predictions of death or illness: health belongs to medicine. This site does not write about it, and I advise against reading a diagnosis into a chart.
• No verdicts about harming relatives or spouses: content on family describes the shape of a relationship and stops there.
• No fees: charts, full readings and compatibility reports are all free, with nothing behind a paywall. The only income is the advertising on the pages.
• No keeping visitors’ birth dates: everything is calculated in your browser, and when you are not signed in your birth data is not sent to the site's servers.
• No guarantees: a chart offers tendencies and timing as a reference. The choices remain yours.

About the Author

I am Haiyuan (海淵), and I run this site on my own: the rules of interpretation, the design of the chart engines, what goes in and the final edit are my responsibility, while the articles and code are mainly generated by AI. I am an engineer by profession, and Chinese metaphysics is something I study in my own time. When you decide whether to trust this site, I would rather you rely on things you can check: the rules of interpretation are in the methodology, the verification is described under "How the Site Is Made" above, and each guide page shows its author and last-updated date under the title.

I started this site because, whenever I looked into BaZi myself, pages full of jargon kept shutting me out. So I put together a version that is easy to understand, easy to look up and easy to learn, and shared it with others who are just as curious. If you have content suggestions or partnership proposals, or you spot any mistakes, please do write in.

Other Work by the Author

Outside my job and this site, I also write web novels in Chinese. They have nothing to do with the content here, but you are welcome to read them:

• 《我在異世界吞噬神明》 (I Devour Gods in Another World)
• 《人間有名》 (A Name in the Mortal World)
• 《香火》 (Incense)

All of my novels are listed on my author page.

Contact

If you have any questions or suggestions, please visit the contact page, or email me directly: [email protected].