Kua Number Calculator

A kua number (also spelled gua number) is a feng shui number from 1 to 9, computed from your year of birth and your sex, that assigns you a personal trigram, an East or West group, and four lucky and four unlucky compass directions. It is the personal half of the oldest compass method in feng shui.

Feng shui has many schools, and the Eight Mansions school, 八宅 (bāzhái), is one of the oldest compass methods, its rules collected in Qing-dynasty manuals like the Eight Mansions Mirror. Its premise is disarmingly personal: buildings do not have luck, pairings do. A house faces somewhere; you, by birth, also "face" somewhere. The kua number, 卦 (guà, "trigram"), is your half of that equation: a number from 1 to 9 that binds you to one of the eight trigrams of the Book of Changes and, through it, to a compass direction, an element, and a family of favorable and unfavorable orientations.

The numbers sort everyone into two camps. East group (kua 1, 3, 4, 9) draws its luck from the north, south, east, and southeast; West group (kua 2, 6, 7, 8) from the west, northwest, southwest, and northeast. Each person gets four auspicious directions with rising intensity and four inauspicious ones with deepening menace, and the practical advice of the whole school boils down to a single elegant instruction: arrange your life (bed, desk, seat, door) so that you face your good directions and put the bad ones at your back.

No secrets here; the method is arithmetic a Qing scholar could do on his fingers. Add the digits of your feng shui birth year until one digit remains. For 1990: 1+9+9+0 = 19, then 1+9 = 10, then 1. Call it S. Men compute 11 − S (again reduced to one digit); women compute 4 + S. So a man born in 1990 has kua 11 − 1 = 10 → 1; a woman born the same year has 4 + 1 = 5, and 5 is where the system shows its one quirk: the center of the grid has no trigram, so a 5 is reassigned, men to 2 and women to 8. This full-year form of the formula works for any birth year, 1900s and 2000s alike, with no century adjustments to remember.

The year boundary is the part most calculators get wrong. The feng shui year turns not on January 1, and not at Chinese New Year either, but at 立春 (lìchūn), the "Start of Spring" solar term around February 4, the same boundary the bazi year pillar uses, because the compass schools run on the solar calendar. Born on February 1, 1990, you compute from 1989, and your kua changes accordingly. Different sites use different boundaries and hand out different numbers to January and February birthdays; we use the classical solar-term boundary, and the result page tells you when it mattered. (A minority of practitioners do count from Chinese New Year; if your teacher does, they will say so.)

Each direction carries a named "wandering star," and the names are wonderfully unsqueamish about what they promise. On the bright side: Sheng Qi ("vitality") is the best of all, the direction for ambition, energy, and the front door if you can manage it; Tian Yi ("heavenly doctor") governs health and recovery, the classical prescription for the sickroom; Yan Nian ("longevity") rules relationships and family harmony, a favorite for the bedroom; and Fu Wei ("stability") is your own trigram's seat, calm and steady, good for a desk and a clear head.

The dark four escalate with admirable frankness: Huo Hai ("mishaps") is everyday friction, stubbed toes and small quarrels; Liu Sha ("six killings") brings setbacks in work and reputation; Wu Gui ("five ghosts") is the direction of quarrels, betrayal, and fire in the old manuals; and Jue Ming ("total loss") is exactly what it sounds like, the direction tradition tells you to sleep away from, not toward. The practical craft is triage: you cannot avoid all four in a real apartment, so you keep the worst two off your bed and desk and let the mild ones have the broom closet.