Learn · Method · 17 min read · Updated September 2026

Flying Stars: how a chart is built

The Compass School’s method of time. Nine numbers, a period of twenty years, a facing direction, and a grid that claims to say where a house is strong this decade. How the chart is made, what it says, and what to make of it.

Oriented N 012°

Water

Fig. 01 The shadow of a window frame moving across a wall. Flying Stars is the part of the tradition that insists a house changes with time.

Everything else on this site treats a house as a fixed thing: a plan, a door, a bed, a direction. Xuan Kong Fei Xing, 玄空飛星, the Flying Stars of the Mysterious Void, does not. It holds that the qi of a house is set by when it was built as well as where it faces, that it changes on a twenty-year clock, and that a grid of nine numbers can show where in the plan the good and the bad of the current period sit. It is the most elaborate method in common use, the one that most needs a compass, and the one whose claims are furthest from anything a body can check.

Three ingredients

A Flying Star chart is made from three things: the Lo Shu square, which supplies the nine numbers and the order in which they move; the period, a number from one to nine that changes every twenty years; and the facing of the house, read on the luopan to one of the twenty-four mountains. Everything else is arithmetic.

The periods

Fig. 01 The nine periods of twenty years in the Xuan Kong cycle of 180, grouped in three yuan of sixty. The number of the period is the star that sits at the centre of every chart drawn in it. Period 9 began at li chun, 4 February 2024, and runs to the start of February 2044. A house is charted by the period in which it was built or last substantially rebuilt; which works count as rebuilding is one of the points on which the school’s teachers disagree.

The San Yuan, 三元, calendar divides time into cycles of one hundred and eighty years, each cut into three yuan of sixty and each yuan into three periods of twenty. The number of the period is the star that governs it and the number that sits at the centre of every chart drawn for a house of that period. Period 8 ran from 2004 to the start of February 2024; Period 9 runs to 2044. The change falls at li chun, the solar term around the fourth of February that begins the feng shui year, not at the lunar new year.

Building the chart

Fig. 02 A chart built in three steps for a house of Period 8 sitting N2 and facing S2. Each palace of the finished chart carries three numbers: the mountain star on the left, the water star on the right, the period star below. Both timely 8s land in the facing palace. North is up, as in every plan on this site; the facing is at the bottom. The dashed line in the first grid is the order in which the numbers fly: centre, north-west, west, north-east, south, north, south-west, east, south-east. Which way a star flies, up or down through the numbers, is set by the yin or yang of the mountain the house sits on or faces.

The period star. Put the period number at the centre and fly it forward through the palaces in the Lo Shu order: centre, north-west, west, north-east, south, north, south-west, east, south-east. Forward means the numbers rise by one at each step, nine turning to one. This first grid is the same for every house of the period.

The mountain star. Find the sitting palace, the one opposite the facing. Take the period star that has landed there and put it at the centre of a second grid: this is the mountain star, 山星, and it flies forward or backward according to the yin or yang of the mountain the house sits on. In the example the house sits N2, the period star in the north is 4, and 4 flies forward.

The water star. Take the period star in the facing palace and put it at the centre of a third grid: the water star, 向星. It flies by the polarity of the facing mountain. In the example the facing is S2, the period star in the south is 3, and 3 flies backward.

The three grids are then written into one, three numbers to a palace. In the example the facing palace, the south, receives a mountain 8 and a water 8, both the ruling star of the period: the chart the school calls double stars at the facing, 雙星到向.

Reading the chart

The mountain star in each palace governs what the school calls people: health, relationships, the standing of the household. The water star governs wealth and activity. A timely mountain star wants something solid on its side of the house, a wall, high ground, a taller building; a timely water star wants openness, a road, movement or water. Where the timely mountain star sits at the sitting and the timely water star at the facing, the chart is the ideal, mountain at the mountain and water at the water; where they are reversed, 上山下水, the chart is the worst kind. The example, with both at the facing, is one of the two common in-between cases.

Fig. 03 Six pairs of stars as the school reads them, drawn one palace each with the mountain star on the left and the water star on the right, which is how every chart on this site is written. The colour is the star’s standing in Period 9: the 9 and the coming 1 timely, the 8 lately retired and still read kindly, and the 2, 3, 5 and 7 untimely. The double 8 at the facing is the chart most Period 8 houses were built to and the one the practitioner activated with water before the door, which is now a chart whose stars have retired; the double 9 at the sitting is the chart of the worked house, with people and wealth both at the back, which wants a hill behind the house and water behind the hill. The 2 with the 5 is the pair the school fears most, the Black Two with the Five Yellow, and it is met with metal, stillness and no building work. The 3 with the 2 is the bull fight, wood breaking earth, read as quarrels and lawsuits; the 1 with the 4 is the scholar’s pair, water feeding wood, where the study or the desk goes; the 7 with the 9 is metal under fire, and the school will not put a stove or the colour red in that palace. The readings are Shen Zhureng’s, codified in 1927, and Skinner’s and Wong’s after him. Shen shi xuan kong xue (1927) for the combinations; Skinner 2003 and Wong 2001 for the English readings. The pairs are the school’s and not the site’s: internally consistent, unsupported by any evidence, and given here so that a chart a practitioner hands you can be read.

The school then reads the two stars in each palace together, and the readings are a fixed vocabulary that a practitioner’s report will use without explaining. They were codified by Shen Zhureng, a Zhejiang scholar who died in 1906 and whose notes on the Xuan Kong texts his son printed in 1927 as the Shen shi xuan kong xue, the book from which every modern manual of the method descends. The drawing gives the six pairs a report is most likely to name. The double 8 at the facing, both timely stars in the front palace, was the chart most houses of Period 8 were built to and the one the practitioner activated with water before the door; since 2024 it is a chart whose stars have retired, which is why the trade has been busy. The double 9 at the sitting is the chart of the worked house in a house, read, people and wealth both at the back, wanting a hill behind and water behind the hill. The 2 with the 5 is the pair the school fears most, the Black Two with the Five Yellow, met with metal, stillness and no building work; the 3 with the 2 is the bull fight, wood breaking earth, read as quarrels and lawsuits; the 1 with the 4 is the scholar’s pair, water feeding wood, where the study goes; the 7 with the 9 is metal under fire, and the school keeps the stove and the colour red out of that palace. The pairs are read by the five elements, the productive and the controlling cycles applied to the numbers’ elements, which is the only part of the vocabulary a reader can reconstruct; the rest is convention, consistent within itself and resting on nothing outside it.

What it claims, and what can be said

This site describes the method and does not prescribe it. Where a Flying Star reading and a plan disagree, every practitioner we have read, including the ones who teach the method, keeps the plan: a bed in the command position in a sector the chart dislikes is a bed in the command position. If a reader wants a chart, the facing has to be right, which means a compass held on the facing wall away from steel, the period has to be right, which means knowing the building’s date, and the chart has to be laid on the plan with its centre at the plan’s centre of gravity and its sectors of equal angle. Most of the errors in published readings are in those three steps, not in the arithmetic.

If you want a chart

Measure the facing. Three readings on the facing wall, away from metal, averaged; note the mountain, not just the direction: S2, not south. The luopan page shows how.
Find the period. The completion date of the building, read against the strip above.
Build the three grids. Period star forward; mountain star from the sitting palace; water star from the facing palace; each flown by the polarity of its mountain.
Lay the chart on the plan. Nine sectors of forty-five degrees around the centre of the plan, north up, the facing where the compass put it.
Read the three places that matter. The door, the bed, the desk: which stars sit over them, and whether they are timely.
Change nothing that the plan forbids. The chart is a lens on a house, not a licence to move the bed out of its command position.

The chart, built for your house

The builder below does steps two and three for any period and any of the twenty-four facing mountains, by the rules the worked example follows, and lays the annual star of a chosen year over the result; the worked reading shows a chart of this kind read palace by palace against a plan. It is the school’s arithmetic, and the site labels it so: it produces nine pairs of numbers and the name of the chart, and what those are worth is the question the essay has already answered.

School · a Flying Star chart for any house

The period is the one the building was finished in; the facing is the mountain the compass reads on the facing side, S2 and not just south. Both are explained above. The chart is north up, as every plan on the site; the facing palace is tinted.