Learn · Method · 14 min read · Updated September 2026

Eight Mansions

The compass method most people meet first. A number from your year of birth, two groups of directions, eight names for the eight ways a bed or a desk can face, the Qing text it comes from and the trigram families behind it, the whole table on one sheet, a couple worked through, and the one problem the method does not solve.

Oriented E 090°

Wood

Fig. 01 Light through an opening onto concrete. Eight Mansions is a method for choosing which way to face; the light does not care, and neither, on the evidence, does anything else.

Eight Mansions, ba zhai, sorts people and buildings into two groups and gives each of the eight directions a name and a rank. It is popular because it is simple: a number from a birth year, a table, and a set of directions to face and avoid. It is also the compass method with the most conspicuous unresolved problem in ordinary household use, which is worth meeting early. This page gives the arithmetic, the table entire, the text and the reasoning behind the two groups, and a couple worked through to the problem.

Where it comes from

The method as now taught descends from the Bazhai Mingjing, the Bright Mirror of the Eight Mansions, a Qing text of the eighteenth century that gathered older material on the yang house into a system a practitioner could apply with a compass and a table. Its premise is older: that each of the eight trigrams of the bagua belongs to a direction, that a house has a trigram from the direction it sits toward, and that a person has one too, from the year of their birth. Match the person to the house and to the directions within it, and the method has done its work. Skinner’s compendium gives the text’s tables; Wong sets the method out as a practitioner uses it; Too made it the best-selling method in the world. The texts page places the Bazhai Mingjing on the shelf, later than most readers expect.

The kua

School · The arithmetic

Each person is given a ming gua, a natal trigram, from their year of birth and their sex. Reduce the year to a single digit by adding its digits until one remains. A man subtracts that digit from eleven and a woman adds four to it, reducing again if needed. A result of five, which has no trigram, is conventionally read as two (Kun) for men and eight (Gen) for women. The tables that circulate reduce only the last two digits of the year and subtract from ten before 2000 and from nine after it; that is the same rule written a century at a time, and it gives the same number. A man’s kua is also the number that flies to the centre of that year’s chart, which is the check on the arithmetic: if the two disagree, the kua is wrong. The year is the Chinese solar year, which begins around 4 February: a birth in January belongs to the year before.

The eight results divide into two groups. The East group is one (Kan, north), three (Zhen, east), four (Xun, south-east) and nine (Li, south). The West group is two (Kun, south-west), six (Qian, north-west), seven (Dui, west) and eight (Gen, north-east). Your four favourable directions are the four of your own group; the other four are unfavourable. That is the whole architecture.

School · Eight Mansions arithmetic

Uses the solar year: a birth before about 4 February belongs to the previous year. Enter the year the method would use.

The eight names

The refinement is that each direction is separately named and ranked. The favourable four are sheng qi (generating breath: vitality, advancement), tian yi (heavenly doctor: health), yan nian (extended years: relationships, endurance) and fu wei (stability: study, the self). The unfavourable four are huo hai (mishaps), wu gui (five ghosts: conflict), liu sha (six harms: entanglement) and jue ming (severed fate: the most adverse). Which direction carries which name depends on the kua, and the ring below shows one kua at a time.

Fig. 01 Eight Mansions. Left: the eight directions sorted into the East group (north, east, south-east, south) and the West group (north-east, south-west, west, north-west). Right: the eight directions for kua 1, Kan: the four in its own group are favourable and carry the names sheng qi, tian yi, yan nian and fu wei; the other four are unfavourable. Tables as printed in Skinner (2008) and Too (1996). The left ring is the same for everyone; the right ring changes with the kua, and the four favourable directions are always the four of the person’s own group. Lineages differ on details, on the reading of kua 5, and on whether a bed is oriented by the head or the body; the method is described here, not endorsed.

The whole method fits on one sheet, and it is worth seeing whole, because the pattern in it is the method’s strength and its weakness at once.

Fig. 02 The whole table. Down the side, the eight kua numbers with their trigrams, East group first and West group second; across the top, the eight directions. In each cell, the name that direction carries for that kua: tinted, the four favourable, sheng qi, tian yi, yan nian and fu wei; plain, the four unfavourable, huo hai, wu gui, liu sha and jue ming. Read along a row for one person’s directions; read down a column to see that every direction is somebody’s best and somebody else’s worst, which is the couple problem in one glance. The table is the one printed in Skinner (2008) and Too (1996) and it is the same data the ring above and the calculator use. Five, which has no trigram, is read as two for men and eight for women in the convention most manuals follow. Which of the eight names carries which meaning is the school’s; the site describes the method and does not endorse it.

Read along a row and the table gives one person their eight directions. Read down a column and every direction is somebody’s sheng qi and somebody else’s jue ming: north is the best direction for kua four and the worst for kua two. The method has no neutral direction and no direction that is good for everyone, which is why it cannot be applied to a room without first knowing who will use it, and why two people cannot always be given the same room.

The building’s own kua

The method also types buildings. A house’s trigram is taken from its sitting direction, the opposite of the facing, and it too is East or West group; a house whose group matches its occupants’ is read as fitting them, and the eight sectors of the plan are named by the same eight terms, so that a house has a sheng qi sector and a jue ming sector of its own. Some practitioners start from the house and treat personal directions as refinements within it; others start from the person. The luopan essay describes how the facing is taken, and the facing guide how to take it.

Plan 03 Eight Mansions on a plan: the house divided into eight sectors from its centre, for a person of kua 1 The eight sectors are taken from the centre of the plan, not from the door. For kua 1, a Kan person of the East group, the favourable sectors are north, east, south-east and south, left plain; the unfavourable ones, north-east, south-west, west and north-west, are hatched. The bed’s head is in the east, the desk faces south-east, and the front door opens in the south. Another kua turns the pattern; the calculator on this page gives yours.

Applied to a plan, the method looks like the drawing: the house divided into eight from its centre, four sectors plain and four hatched for the person whose kua the plan is drawn for, and the bed, the desk and the door tested against them. The bed’s head goes in a favourable sector or points to a favourable direction; the desk faces one; the front door, which the occupant did not choose, is read and, where it opens in an unfavourable sector, answered by the room inside it. The things that must be borne but not honoured, the toilet, the stove’s mouth, the rubbish, are put in the unfavourable sectors to press them down, which is the origin of the modern bathroom rules the bathroom page describes. A house drawn for a West-group person has the plain and the hatched sectors exchanged, which is the couple problem below in one picture.

The stove, the door and the toilet

Plan 04 The stove, the door and the toilet, by the school A house of twelve metres by nine sitting north and facing south, a Kan house, kua one, with its eight sectors named from the school’s table: sheng qi in the south-east, tian yi in the east, yan nian in the south and fu wei in the north are its four favourable sectors, and huo hai in the west, wu gui in the north-east, liu sha in the north-west and jue ming in the south-west its four unfavourable. The school honours the favourable sectors with the door, the bed and the hall, and presses the things it must have but will not honour into the unfavourable ones. The door is in the south-east, the sheng qi. The stove stands in the west, the huo hai, and its mouth, the front the cook feeds it from, is turned to face east, the tian yi: it sits in a bad sector and faces a good direction, which is the rule the manuals give as sit bad, face good. The toilet is in the north-west, the liu sha, pressed down. The bed, in the north-east room, is turned with its head to the east, the tian yi, since its own sector is unfavourable and the head can be pointed where the room cannot be moved. The site records the rule as the school’s; the room guides place the stove by the door and the sink.

The bed is the school’s first concern and the drawing above gives its next three, which are the things a house cannot honour but must have. The rule has a name in the manuals, sit bad, face good, and one plan shows it. The house sits north and faces south, a Kan house, kua one, and its eight sectors take the names the table gives them, the four favourable to the south-east, east, south and north and the four unfavourable to the west, north-east, north-west and south-west. The door goes in a favourable sector, here the south-east and the sheng qi, because what enters enters there; the front door guide gives what the Form school asks of the same door, which is a clear line and a light, and the two do not conflict. The stove is the school’s subtlest placement. It is fire, and the manuals will not put fire in a sector they honour, so its body stands in an unfavourable sector, here the west and the huo hai, where its heat presses the bad influence down; but its mouth, the front the cook feeds it from, is turned to face a favourable direction, here the east and the tian yi, the heavenly doctor, so that what is cooked is cooked toward health. A stove that sits in a good sector wastes it and one that faces a bad direction feeds the household from it, and a practitioner of the school will turn a hob ninety degrees on this rule alone. The toilet is pressed into an unfavourable sector, here the north-west and the liu sha, on the principle the bathroom page traces to this school, that what is unclean is put where it can do no harm to what is honoured. And the bed, which the school would have in a favourable room, is in this house in the north-east, the wu gui, because the plan gives no other bedroom; the school’s answer is the one the couple got, to point the head where the room cannot be moved, east to the tian yi. The site records the rule as the school’s and notes what it costs: a stove turned to face east in a kitchen whose door is east now shows the cook’s back to the door, which the kitchen page refuses, and a household that keeps both rules keeps the room’s first.

A couple, worked

Take two people born in 1981. The digits of the year sum to nineteen and then to one. He subtracts one from eleven, reduces ten to one, and is kua one, Kan, East group; she adds four to one and is kua five, which has no trigram, so she is read as kua eight, Gen, West group. His favourable directions are north, east, south-east and south; hers are north-east, south-west, west and north-west. There is no overlap. His sheng qi, the south-east, is her jue ming; her sheng qi, the south-west, is his. Turn the bed for him and it points to her worst direction; turn it for her and the reverse. The couple born in 1982 fare no better: the year reduces to two; he subtracts two from eleven and is kua nine, Li, East; she adds four to two and is kua six, Qian, West. In most years the sexes land in opposite groups, because the male and female sequences run through the numbers in opposite directions, and the method’s arithmetic guarantees the problem it cannot solve.

The problem the method does not solve

Where it stands

Where Eight Mansions and the command position conflict, every practitioner the site has read takes the command position. Where they agree, the method has done its work: it has made you look at the room and choose.