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Free calculator · Eastern calendars

BaZi Calculator

BaZi, the Four Pillars of Destiny, describes your birth with four pairs of a heavenly stem and an earthly branch: for year, month, day and hour. The calculator works them out the way the UmbraLux app does, day and hour by the true solar time of your birthplace, and names your day master.

Date of birth

As exact as you can, ideally from your birth certificate.

Your place is missing? Take the nearest town; a few kilometres hardly change the result.

The calculation runs in your browser. Your birth data is neither sent nor stored; only this device remembers your last entry. · Place data: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)

How the Four Pillars are calculated

The calculator runs the same calculation as the UmbraLux app, in five steps:

  1. 1

    The year from Li Chun

    The BaZi year begins at Li Chun, when the Sun reaches 315° (3 to 5 February); the years run in the cycle of the sixty pairs of ten stems and twelve branches.

  2. 2

    The month by the solar terms

    The months begin at the twelve solar terms (jie), 30° apart, the first at Li Chun; the month's stem follows from the year's.

  3. 3

    The day by the Sun's clock

    Day and hour count in the true solar time of the birthplace (12:00 when the Sun stands in the south), not by the clock with its time zone and summer time. The day turns at 23:00 with the hour of the Rat; the days run in the sixty-day cycle without a break.

  4. 4

    The hour

    Each double hour has a branch (23:00 to 1:00 the Rat, 1:00 to 3:00 the Ox and so on); its stem follows from the day's.

  5. 5

    The ten gods

    Each stem stands in one of ten relations (the ten gods) to the day master, the stem of your day, by element and polarity.

Example: 15 May 1990, 14:30, Berlin

14:30 in Berlin was 12:30 Universal Time (UTC+2), and 13:27 in true solar time at the birthplace.

The pillars: year Geng-Wu, month Xin-Si, day Geng-Chen, hour Gui-Wei. The day master is Geng, Yang Metal.

What BaZi describes

BaZi, "eight characters", comes from Chinese fate calculation. It reads the day master as yourself, the other stems and branches as the forces around you, and the balance of the five elements between them.

The calculation is astronomical and calendrical; what it means is the teaching of BaZi.

In the library

Questions about BaZi

Why does my day pillar differ from another calculator?

Because the day counts by the true solar time of the birthplace and turns at 23:00; a calculation by the clock of the time zone, or one that turns the day at midnight, can give another day around midnight.

Do I need my birth time?

For the hour pillar, yes. Without a time the calculator shows year, month and day; where a solar term falls on your birthday, it names both month pillars with the time. Born after 23:00 solar time, you would have the next day's pillar.

What is the day master?

The heavenly stem of your day pillar. BaZi reads it as yourself; the other stems relate to it as the ten gods.

Why does the year not begin on 1 January?

BaZi counts the solar year, which begins at Li Chun around 4 February. The Chinese zodiac calculator shows both the animal of that year and the one of the lunar year.

Is my data stored?

No. The calculation runs in your browser; your date, time and place are neither sent nor stored. Only your device remembers your last entry, and you can delete it below the form.

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