Reading a Chart Someone Else Calculated for You

A chart from an app, a reader or a relative: how to find the day master, check what the chart was cast from, and tell the eight characters apart from the labels added around them.

DK·3 October 2026·5 min read

A chart from somewhere else usually arrives as a screenshot: a 만세력 app on a relative's phone, a page from a Chinese site, a reader's printout. The eight characters belong to the same system as the chart on this site. Almost everything around them can differ: the layout, the date the chart was cast from, and a ring of extra labels this site doesn't use.

So read it in three passes. Find the day master. Check what the chart was cast from. Then sort the eight characters from everything added around them.

Find the day master first

Stems sit on top and branches underneath, one column per pillar. The columns can run either way. This site puts the year on the left; Korean 만세력 apps usually put it on the right, with the hour on the left. Either way, the day master doesn't move. It's the top character of the day pillar, the third column counting from the year.

If the other chart labels its characters with Ten Gods, those labels are read from the day master, so the labels on the stems will agree with this site's wherever the stems do. The branches can carry different labels, because calculators don't all agree on how to label a branch.

Check what it was cast from

A chart is only as good as the date and time behind it, and the commonest mistake isn't in the calculation.

Lunar or solar. Many Koreans born before the 1980s still keep their birthdays by the lunar calendar. A 만세력 that accepts a lunar date converts it before casting the chart. Typed into a form that expects a solar date, the same lunar birthday produces a chart for the wrong day. For births between 1940 and 2010, the error runs between about three and eight weeks, and is usually about five. The month and day pillars come out wrong, the hour's stem goes with the day, and sometimes the year goes too. This site's form takes a solar date, so convert a lunar birthday before you enter it.

The leap month. About seven times in nineteen years, the lunar calendar repeats a month. A birthday in the repeated month, entered as the ordinary one, lands a month early. If the birthday came from family, ask whether it fell in a leap month, a 윤달.

Time and place. Where the birth time came from matters as much as the date, and so does which clock the calculator used.

What the extra labels are

Around the eight characters, another chart may print labels this site doesn't show, or doesn't compute at all.

On the other chart	What it is	On this site
藏干, hidden stems	The stems held inside each branch, usually printed small beneath it	Computed and used in the strength verdict, not displayed
十二運星, the twelve stages	Where the day master stands in a twelve-step life cycle, branch by branch	Shown as "Life Stage"
空亡, the void	Two branches your ten-day run of pillars leaves out	Not computed
刑, 破, 害	Punishments, breaks and harms: branch relations beyond clash and combination	Not computed; clashes and combinations are
神煞, spirit stars	Labels from lookup tables, such as 桃花, peach blossom, and 驛馬, the travelling horse	Not computed
胎元, 命宮	Extra pillars for the month of conception and the "life palace"	Not computed

The void comes straight out of the sixty-pillar cycle. Ten stems against twelve branches means every run of ten pillars, a 旬, uses ten branches and leaves two out. Take it from the day pillar: born on a Ding Hai 丁亥 day, you're in the run that begins at 甲申 and never reaches 午 or 未, so those two are your void branches. 空亡 means "empty and lost", and readers who use it treat those branches as hollowed out.

Spirit stars are the loosest layer on the page. Each one is looked up from a table, usually keyed to the year or the day branch: 桃花 for romance, 驛馬 for movement and travel. The classics are divided on them. The Qing-dynasty 子平真詮, one of the standard BaZi texts, gives them a chapter whose title says they have nothing to do with a chart's structure, and opens it like this:

八字格局，專以月令配四柱，至於星辰好歹，既不能為生克之用，又何以操成敗之權？

A chart's structure comes solely from setting the month command against the four pillars. As for the stars, good or bad: they can neither produce nor control anything, so how could they decide success or failure?

This site leaves them out, on the same side of that argument.

When two charts disagree

If the other chart's eight characters differ from the ones here, the column that differs tells you where to look.

If this differs	Look at
The hour only	The birth time, the longitude correction and summer time
The day	The midnight rule, or a wrong date
The month	A birth close to a solar term, or a lunar date entered as solar
The year	A year counted from 1 January or the Lunar New Year instead of 立春, or a lunar date
The luck-pillar ages	Whether ages are counted from zero or from one, and how they're rounded

Some of these are errors and some are honest splits between schools, and the post on why calculators disagree sorts one kind from the other.

Where this site stands

This site casts a chart from a solar date and a city, shows the eight characters year first, and computes the hidden stems, the twelve stages, and the clashes and combinations between branches. It doesn't compute the void, the punishments, breaks and harms, the spirit stars or the extra pillars. Where another chart shows those, it isn't contradicting this one. It's adding a layer this one leaves out.

Read the eight characters first, then the labels. The characters are the chart. The labels are someone's reading of it.