Chinese birth chart
Give it your birth date and time and it works out your BaZi — the "eight characters" a traditional Chinese reader writes down for you. Every character is explained here in ordinary words, and the bottom of the page shows exactly how each one was worked out, so nothing is taken on trust.
Use the clock time where you were born. Times are read as Singapore / China time (UTC+8).
Each column is one pillar: a pair of Chinese characters. The top character is a Heavenly Stem — one of ten labels, each an element in either its active (yang) or quiet (yin) form. The bottom is an Earthly Branch — one of the twelve animals. Four pillars, two characters each, is where "eight characters" comes from. Traditional charts print them right to left, hour first; this page reads left to right, oldest first.
| Element | Count | Where it shows up |
|---|
Each animal branch is also said to hold one to three stems inside it — the "hidden" part of the chart. They are not extra birth details; they are a fixed list that comes with each animal. Readers count them when weighing up your elements, which is why the tally above has two rows.
| Pillar | Animal | Holds |
|---|
Every character above comes from one of these four steps. Check any of them yourself against any Chinese almanac.
BaZi is a traditional system, not science — this page works out what the tradition says your characters are, and explains what readers take them to mean. It does not predict anything. Solar-term times are computed from the sun's position and match the times published by the Purple Mountain Observatory to the minute. Built on .