The Travel Palace in Zi Wei Dou Shu: Who You Are Once You Step Out the Door

The Travel Palace sits directly opposite the Life Palace. The Life Palace is who you are to begin with; the Travel Palace is who you become when you walk out the door and into the crowd. They are two ends of the same line, which the old texts call "Life and Travel on one line". Some people are the same inside and out; others are gentle at home and fierce out in the world. Reading the Travel Palace means reading that gap.

How to read the Travel Palace

1. Start with the major star. The star here describes your public image and the chances you meet: Zi Wei carries weight out in the world, Tian Tong is well liked, Qi Sha charges into battle. Each of the fourteen is covered below.
2. Compare with the Life Palace. The palace opposite the Travel Palace is the Life Palace. Only by reading the two together can you tell whether you are "the same inside and out" or "soft outside, hard inside" or "steady inside, charging outside".
3. Look at the Travel–Spouse–Mind trine. The trine of the Travel Palace is the Spouse and Mind Palaces, so the person you are out in the world is tied to love and to inner contentment.
4. Look at transformations and malefic stars. Hua Lu or Hua Ke here means things go smoothly away from home and you have a good name; Hua Ji means you care a lot about how things go outside and tend to rush around; malefic stars usually mean competition and hard work out in the world.

With an empty Life Palace, the Travel Palace always holds a pair

In our sample about 16.4% of charts have no major star in the Life Palace, and the traditional method is to borrow the major stars of the palace opposite, the Travel Palace. One thing rarely mentioned: when the Life Palace is empty, the Travel Palace always holds two major stars together, and only ever one of the 12 pairs below; never a single star, and never both palaces empty. The reason is that in the arrangement of the fourteen major stars, an empty palace always sits opposite a two-star palace.

Conversely, when Tian Fu, Tian Xiang, Qi Sha or Po Jun sits in the Travel Palace, the Life Palace always has a major star: Tian Fu and Qi Sha, and Tian Xiang and Po Jun, always sit opposite each other.

The Travel–Spouse–Mind trine

The Travel, Spouse and Mind Palaces sit four palaces apart and form a trine. Zi Wei, Lian Zhen and Wu Qu, and Qi Sha, Po Jun and Tan Lang, always form trines too, so as soon as one of them is in the Travel Palace, the other two are always in the Spouse and Mind Palaces. Other stars have fixed links as well:

The fourteen major stars in the Travel Palace

What our sample shows

How we counted: this site’s engine cast one Zi Wei chart for every day from 1960 to 2005 (birth hour drawn by a fixed-seed random sample), 16,802 charts in all. These figures describe how chart structures are distributed; they do not measure anyone’s luck away from home.