Bazi Symbolic Stars: Peach Blossom, Travelling Horse, Canopy and Nobleman

Every Bazi calculator prints a row of extra names under the four pillars — Peach Blossom, Travelling Horse, Canopy, Nobleman, Goat Blade — and they are the part of a chart people remember first. They are also the part beginners overrate most: one Peach Blossom and the reading turns to romance; one Travelling Horse and it turns to emigration. This page covers what these symbolic stars (神煞, shen sha) actually are, how to look up the four you will meet most often, and where they belong in the order of reading a chart — which is after the Ten Gods, not before.

What are shen sha? Markers, not planets

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The English word “star” misleads. A symbolic star is not a celestial body and nothing is being observed. Shen sha (神 “spirit”, 煞 “baleful influence”) is a name attached to a branch or stem when a fixed lookup rule matches: take one pillar’s branch (or the day stem), read a table, and if the result appears elsewhere in the chart, the chart “has” that star.

Two consequences follow directly:

• Stars are looked up, not calculated. There is no strength judgment inside a lookup — no counting of elements, no weighing of seasons. That makes them the most mechanical layer of a chart, and the one carrying the least information.
• They change nothing in the balance of the chart. The Day Master’s strength, the five-element balance, and the ten-god relations are all exactly the same with or without them. A symbolic star is an annotation written over a chart that is already complete.

Some of the names really were star names first — the Canopy and the Nobleman both have entries in the official astronomy treatises — while others are simply nicknames for a branch relationship. The tradition itself never treated the list as sacred: the Qing court’s almanac compilation Xieji Bianfang Shu (《协纪辨方书》) spent a good deal of effort pruning centuries of accumulated, contradictory shen sha. Scepticism about them is not a modern import.

How the lookup works: the three-harmony groups

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Three of the four stars here come from one table. The twelve earthly branches fall into four three-harmony groups (三合, san he), each tied to an element:

Start from the year branch or the day branch, find its group, and read the star’s branch from the tables below. If that branch sits in any other pillar, the star is present. (Schools differ on whether the year or day branch is primary; most modern calculators check both. See Stems and Branches if the branch names are new.)

Peach Blossom (Tao Hua): charm and attraction

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The four results are exactly 子午卯酉, the four cardinal branches. They are not arbitrary: each is the “bathing” (沐浴, mu yu) stage of its group’s element in the twelve life stages — water is born at 申, so it bathes at 酉; fire is born at 寅, so it bathes at 卯. The bathing stage is the exposed, unformed moment just after birth, and the tradition reads it as openness, display, and ease of being influenced.

That is also why the older name for Peach Blossom is Xian Chi (咸池, “the Salty Pool”). The Huainanzi chapter “Tianwen xun” (《淮南子·天文训》) traces the sun’s daily course and has it rise from the Yang Valley and bathe in the Xian Chi (「日出于旸谷,浴于咸池」) — the pool was where the sun washed. The name later became a constellation (Shiji, “Tianguan shu”: 「西宫咸池」, the Xian Chi of the western palace) and only after that a Bazi star. Myth → star name → chart marker, with “bathing” as the thread linking all three.

Traditional meaning: charisma, popularity, attractiveness, a talent for being noticed; the shadow side is entanglement and scattered attention. It is a social star more than a romantic one.

Travelling Horse (Yi Ma): movement and relocation

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The rule: take the group’s birth branch and find the branch that clashes with it. Water is born at 申, 申 clashes 寅, so the horse is 寅. Since birth branches are always 寅申巳亥, the horse always lands on 寅申巳亥 too — the “four horse branches”. The name comes from the imperial relay-post system (驿, yi), where riders changed horses at each station and never stopped: in transit, on the move.

Traditional meaning: travel, relocation, job changes, living or working abroad. The star itself is neither lucky nor unlucky — a move toward the chart’s favourable element is opportunity, a move toward the unfavourable one is wasted effort. That judgment is impossible without first reading the Day Master’s strength, which is the clearest illustration of why symbolic stars sit downstream of the main reading.

Canopy (Hua Gai): art, spirituality and solitude

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The Canopy is the group’s storage (墓库, mu ku) branch — always one of 辰戌丑未, the four “vault” branches that close and hold.

The name is a real asterism. The astronomy treatise of the Jin Shu (《晋书·天文志》) places the Hua Gai stars in the Purple Forbidden enclosure directly above the Emperor’s seat, 「所以覆蔽大帝之坐也」 — “that by which the Great Emperor’s seat is covered”. It was the ceremonial canopy held over a ruler: an exalted position, and a lonely one. Bazi kept both halves.

Traditional meaning: intelligence, artistic and contemplative gifts, an affinity for religion, philosophy or the occult; the shadow side is aloofness and thin family ties. The old line that “Canopy plus emptiness suits a monk” circulates widely, but it skips every condition of the whole chart and should not be read alone.

Nobleman (Tian Yi Gui Ren): the helper star

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The Nobleman works differently from the other three: it is looked up from the day stem (some schools also accept the year stem), not from a branch group, and each stem has two Nobleman branches.

This is the most common version, memorised as the rhyme 「甲戊庚牛羊,乙己鼠猴乡,丙丁猪鸡位,壬癸兔蛇藏,六辛逢马虎」. One variant is worth knowing because calculators disagree over it: a second rhyme groups 庚 with 辛 under 寅午 (「庚辛逢马虎」) instead of with 甲戊 under 丑未. If your software and a book disagree for a 庚 Day Master, that is why — pick one school’s table and keep to it. Some traditions further split each pair into a “day” and a “night” Nobleman by birth hour; most modern readers ignore the split.

The name is another borrowed star. Tian Yi (天乙, also written 天一) is a single star near the gate of the Purple Forbidden enclosure, which the Jin Shu astronomy treatise describes as a spirit of the Heavenly Emperor, 「主战斗,知人吉凶者也」 — “in charge of battle, knowing the good and ill fortune of men”. In Bazi it became the star that turns ill fortune aside.

Traditional meaning: help arriving from outside — mentors, patrons, a timely introduction, being rescued at the last moment. Old manuals rank it first among the auspicious stars. For readers searching for a “nobleman star” (the term is especially common in Singapore and Malaysia), this is the one meant: in practice it is read as the kind of person who tends to help you, signalled by the animal of the Nobleman branch, and the years when that branch returns as the annual pillar.

A worked example

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Take the chart used throughout this series, 甲子 丙寅 戊辰 壬戌 (branches 子 · 寅 · 辰 · 戌, Day Master 戊):

Two of four, which is typical. With four branches and lookups that each cover one or two of the twelve, almost every chart carries a few of these stars — and that is exactly why their presence alone says so little.

Symbolic stars vs. the Ten Gods: which comes first?

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The Ten Gods come first, always. The modern reading order is: cast the chart, identify the Day Master, judge its strength, find the useful element, read the ten-god relations — and only then look at symbolic stars. Three reasons:

1. Stars carry no force. Good and bad outcomes in Bazi come from the generating and overcoming of the five elements. A star adds nothing to that balance and removes nothing, so it cannot decide anything by itself.
2. Hit rates are built in. Across the natal chart, the luck pillars and the years, everyone meets a Peach Blossom or a Horse somewhere. A marker everyone has does not distinguish anyone.
3. The schools disagree. Year branch or day branch, which variant table, which stars count at all — the tables are not uniform, and new stars kept being added for centuries.

So the useful question is never “do I have a Peach Blossom?” but “does this attraction, this move, this helper serve the chart’s useful element or work against it?” A Peach Blossom in a chart that needs its energy can be a professional asset; the same star in an overloaded chart reads as distraction. Read a star as a footnote to a chart that is already understood, not as a verdict.

Find your symbolic stars

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Looking stars up by hand is easy once the four tables above are in front of you, but it means first getting the four pillars right — solar-term month boundaries and the hour pillar are where hand-cast charts usually go wrong. The Bazi Calculator casts the pillars for you; check its branches against the tables here, then follow the luck pillars to see in which decade and year a Horse or Nobleman branch comes round again. If the Day Master and strength steps are still unfamiliar, start with What Is Bazi.

A comparison for Western readers

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The closest Western analogue is the Arabic Parts (or Lots) of medieval astrology — the Part of Fortune and its relatives. Both are derived mechanically from points already in the chart, both add a layer of symbolic labels without changing any planet’s strength, both multiplied into the hundreds in medieval manuals, and both were pruned hard by later practice, leaving a handful in common use. The difference is the raw material: Lots are degrees on the ecliptic, computed geometrically; shen sha are stem-and-branch matches, looked up from a table.

Related: What Is Bazi · Bazi Day Master · Bazi Ten Gods · Bazi Luck Pillars · Bazi Calculator · back to Destiny · Foundations

Symbolic stars are a traditional cultural system; their lookup rules and meanings vary between schools and have no scientific basis. Read them for cultural interest, not as grounds for decisions.