Most feng shui introductions begin with the eight-direction map — the chart behind “wealth corner” and “career direction.” That map is downstream of something older: eight three-line symbols, each a different stacking of a solid and a broken line — the yin and yang pair — that are the working vocabulary of the I Ching, of feng shui direction-reading, and of Chinese divination generally. The eight trigrams (八卦, bāguà) are what this page lays out: how the symbols are built, the full table of names, images, elements and family roles, the classical passages the table comes from, the difference between the pre-heaven and post-heaven arrangements, and how a trigram is actually read.
Yin and yang (阴阳, yīnyáng) is the first pair of concepts in the Chinese arts of divination, medicine, and placement — and probably the most misread. Most introductions begin with a list of opposites: dark and light, cold and hot. This page begins where the two characters actually begin: with landscape. The sun in China tracks across the southern sky, so every hill has a bright face and a shaded one, and every east-flowing river has one bank that faces the sun and one that turns from it. From that geographic pair, Chinese thought built a system in which nothing is one-sided, everything contains its opposite, and balance is a movement rather than a compromise. Below: the words’ literal meaning, the classic line that defines the system, what the famous symbol is actually saying, how the sorting works, and where the model still does work in the I Ching, Bazi, and feng shui.
When a feng shui book overlays a floor plan with a 3×3 grid, or a flying-star chart drops the numbers 1 through 9 into its nine cells, that frame is not the author’s invention. It is the Lo Shu square (洛书, Luoshu, “the writing of the Luo River”) — and beside it stands an older companion, the He Tu (河图, Hetu, “the diagram of the River”), which pairs the same numbers with the five phases. Cited together as one phrase — he tu luo shu (河图洛书) — the two are the numerical layer beneath the more famous charts: the post-heaven trigrams carry Lo Shu digits as their addresses, and every flying-star or nine-palace diagram is drawn on the Lo Shu grid. This page lays out both figures: the legend and the earliest text, the birth and completion numbers of the He Tu, the magic square of the Lo Shu, how the trigrams plug into it, where the two charts surface in practice, and how they differ.
Wood, fire, earth, metal, water: the Chinese five elements (五行, wuxing) are the shared working vocabulary of acupuncture, feng shui, Bazi, and Chinese dietary theory — and almost every English speaker first meets them under a name that misleads. Xing (行) is a verb: to move, to act, to walk. What the system actually names is five phases of change — five kinds of process that generate and restrain one another in two closed loops. This page lays out the five phases in full, the generating and overcoming cycles, the season-direction-organ correspondences that make the system usable, and why “elements” is a translation to handle with care.
Chinese timekeeping runs on two interlocking sets of signs: ten heavenly stems (天干, tiangan) and twelve earthly branches (地支, dizhi) — together covered by the umbrella term ganzhi (干支), and in older romanizations tien gan dizhi. Neither set is used alone. One stem and one branch, taken in step, form a two-character label — 甲子 jiazi, 乙丑 yichou, 丙寅 bingyin… — and because the two sets have different lengths, the labels run through sixty distinct combinations before returning to the start. That is the Chinese sexagenary cycle: the sixty-term counter that dates years, months, days, and hours on a Chinese calendar, and that supplies all eight characters of a Bazi chart. This page explains the two sets of signs, how the pairing produces sixty terms rather than a hundred and twenty, and where the system actually came from — a story that begins with carved oracle bones, not with books.
Each Gregorian year maps to one of twelve Chinese zodiac animals (生肖, shēngxiào), cycling in a fixed twelve-year order. Look up any birth year from 1924 to 2032 in the table below to find its animal, its earthly branch, its full stem-branch year pillar, and its element. A person born in 2024 is a Dragon, 2025 a Snake, 2026 a Horse — but the animal alone is only half the sign: the same animal returns every twelve years paired with a different element, so the full combination repeats only every sixty years.
The Chinese calendar cuts the solar year into 24 equal slices called jieqi (节气, solar terms). Each marks the moment the Sun reaches a fixed point on the ecliptic — every 15 degrees of longitude — so the same term falls on almost the same Gregorian date every year. This page lists all 24 terms with their exact 2026 dates and times (computed to the minute), then explains how the system is defined and what each term marks in the agricultural and seasonal year.
Chinese calendar dates behave differently from Gregorian ones in three visible ways: months don’t have a fixed length, Chinese New Year lands on a different Gregorian date every year, and every two or three years a whole extra month appears. None of this is arbitrary. It follows a precise rule for keeping a lunisolar calendar — one that tracks the Moon and the Sun at the same time — from drifting away from the seasons.
