The year layer
How the year layer of Chinese astrology actually works: fixed branch pairings, tai sui as a compass position, the arithmetic behind the annual star chart, and why a branch month starts at a solar term.
The same word, year, means different things at different layers. The year pillar turns once every twelve years, the month pillar twelve times a year, the day pillar every sixty days, and the hour pillar every two hours. This topic handles the slowest layer only: the year pillar. Mixing the layers is the most common defect in annual writing — a conclusion drawn from the year pillar and applied to a month is aimed at the wrong clock.
Sitting on, clashing, harming, breaking and punishing are not judgements; they are positions in a table. Each branch has exactly one partner in each relation, so two branches settle the label with no second lookup and no weighting. The table is short enough to memorise, and that is the point: it is a lookup, not a theory. In the 2026 Horse year four of the twelve signs carry one: the Horse sits on it, the Rat clashes, the Ox harms and the Rabbit breaks. One person in three — that is the real scale of fan tai sui in any given year.
Each branch maps to a compass sector, and wu is south. That sector is the tai sui direction; the opposite one, north in 2026, is sui po. The instruction attached to both concerns ground-breaking: no digging, no demolition, no major works. It governs construction, not which room you sleep in. The Jupiter in the English name explains where the count came from, not why the sector would matter.
The annual flying star chart is not observed. Add the digits of the year until one remains, subtract from eleven, reduce anything above nine. For 2026 that gives one white in the centre, five yellow in the south and eight white in the east. No parameter of your building enters the calculation, so the chart is identical for every building on earth that year. What separates two houses is the base chart, not the annual star.
The year pillar answers one question: which fixed relation your birth branch falls into this year. It does not answer anything individual — that requires the day pillar. The usable form is a review prompt: which months turn at a solar term, which two sectors should not be dug, which room to leave alone and which to use. Those questions have answers, and the answers can be checked. A useful test of any annual write-up is whether it can be checked at all: a date, a direction, a count. A claim that cannot be checked is not more spiritual than one that can; it is only harder to argue with.
The four articles take the same year from four angles. One reads the relation table and shows why the same paragraph returns every twelve years. One follows the year branch into a compass sector and the construction rule attached to it. One works through the arithmetic of the annual star chart. One drops a layer to the month and shows that a branch month begins at a solar term rather than on the first of the calendar month. Together they cover what the year layer can say, and where it stops. A year described without any of those four angles is usually a template with the year number swapped in.
Reading path
Use this sequence to understand the framework before opening individual guides or tools. Each step adds context needed by the next.
What an annual animal forecast actually computes: the fixed pairing between your birth branch and the year branch, why the answer repeats every twelve years, and what the other seven characters of a chart add.
Tai sui explained as a calendar coordinate: the year branch, its compass sector, the construction rule attached to it, and the four signs labelled in 2026.
How the annual flying star chart is computed from the year digits, how the 2026 grid fills, and which layer of Xuan Kong actually describes your building.
Month branches begin at solar terms, not on the first of the month. Why a monthly forecast keyed to the calendar is off by days, and why the animal relation never changes.
BaZi
Enter a Gregorian birth date and local time to see the four pillars, hidden stems, Ten Gods, Na Yin, branch relations, and element counts, with clear calendar and time-boundary limits.
Chinese Astrology
Enter a Gregorian birth date, time branch, and traditional chart-direction rule to see 12 palaces, stems, branches, stars, transformations, body palace, and decade ranges without personality or event predictions.