Chinese Numerology a number chart, the Luoshu square, and your number from your birth date

Read across any row and you will see the two big layers do not agree about anything, because they are not answering the same question. The pun column is about sound: what the number's name resembles when spoken, mostly in Mandarin or Cantonese. The other columns are about position: where the number sits in the Luoshu, which of the eight trigrams of the Book of Changes lives there, and which of the five elements goes with it. In the square, a number has no personality. It is an address.

The pun layer is real and it moves money: towers in Hong Kong and Taiwan skip their fourth floors, and numbers heavy with eights fetch premiums at license-plate auctions. It is also younger than the square, strongest in Cantonese, and not even uniform across Chinese: Teochew speakers hear happiness in four and give red packets in fours. Our feng shui numbers page tells that story in full, with the reason your house number matters less than your front door; eight has its own page under prosperity, and four under death.

Start with the sentence everybody quotes. The Great Treatise, the long commentary appended to the Book of Changes, says that the Yellow River put out a chart and the Luo put out a writing, and that the sages took them as their model. That is the whole of it. There is no turtle in the sentence, no square, and not a single number.

The first people on record to say what the Writing was did not think it was a square. The History of the Former Han, in its treatise on the five phases, reports the view of Liu Xin, the scholar who catalogued the imperial library at the end of that dynasty: the legendary Fu Xi received the River Chart and drew the eight trigrams from it, and Yu, when he tamed the great flood, was given the Luo Writing and set it out as the Great Plan. The Great Plan is a chapter of the Book of Documents, a list of nine divisions for governing a realm, starting with the five phases. For the Han, then, the Writing from the Luo was a text with nine headings. Nine was already the number that mattered; the digits had not arrived.

They turn up somewhere else entirely: in a description of the Bright Hall, the ritual building in which a Zhou king was supposed to move from room to room with the seasons. The Record of Rites of the Elder Dai says the hall had nine rooms, and then prints a bare row of digits, two, nine, four, seven, five, three, six, one, eight. Cut it into threes and you have the square, every line totaling fifteen. The Record never says why. Its commentator Lu Bian, writing in the sixth century, supplies the reason: the nine rooms copied the pattern on a turtle. The turtle itself had reached the story by another road. The traditional commentary to the Great Plan, credited to Kong Anguo, says a divine turtle came out of the Luo with markings on its back numbering up to nine, and that Yu put them in order as the nine divisions.

The square was also a way of counting. The Shushu Jiyi, a short handbook of calculation attributed to the Han scholar Xu Yue, lists fourteen methods, and one of them is the nine-palace method. Its commentary gives the layout as a body: two and four for shoulders, six and eight for feet, three on the left and seven on the right, nine on the head, one underfoot, five in the middle. That rhyme is still the standard way the square is remembered, and it is why the counting rods are in the picture at the top of this page.

And the square moved. When the astronomer Zhang Heng petitioned the throne in the second century against the prophecy books then in fashion, he listed the nine palaces among the methods that, unlike the prophecies, gave results that could be checked. The Tang commentary on his biography explains the term with a line from an apocryphal Changes text, the Qian Zao Du: the Taiyi spirit takes its numbers and travels the nine palaces. Then it quotes Zheng Xuan's note, which gives the route. The spirit sets out from the Kan palace, goes to Kun, then Zhen, then Xun, rests in the center, and goes on through Qian, Dui and Gen to finish at Li. Put the Luoshu numbers on those palaces and the route reads one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. It is precisely the path the stars take on every annual flying-star chart, including our feng shui 2027 chart. Whoever later systematized the flying stars was walking a road laid out in a second-century footnote. (This page checks that the route and the square agree every time it is built.)

The picture most people carry, a turtle with neat dots on its shell, is the Song dynasty's. Writing in the seventeenth century, Huang Zongxi observed that ever since Zhu Xi printed the River Chart and the Luo Writing in his commentary on the Changes, every household had recited them, and he recorded that the statesman Ouyang Xiu had dismissed the diagrams as preposterous. Song scholars could not even agree which diagram was which. One of them, Wei Liaoweng, held that the nine-square was not the Luo Writing at all but the numbers of the Taiyi's nine palaces, which, given Zheng Xuan's route, is not a bad argument.

Search for a Chinese numerology calculator and half of what comes back asks for your date of birth and fills in a Lo Shu grid. The method runs like this. Write the digits of your birth date into the square, each digit in the cell that carries the same number. Count which numbers repeat and which are missing. Add the digits of the day for a driver number and all the digits for a destiny number. Then read the rows, columns and diagonals as planes of thought, will or success, with certain complete lines hailed as a Raj Yog.

The better sites are candid about where this comes from. One of the larger ones describes its method as standard Indian numerology built on the Lo Shu Grid, and says that "Indian practice adopted it with Vedic planetary rulers." That is a fair account, and it settles the question. The square is Chinese. The reading is not. None of the texts in the table above, and nothing in the Chinese systems that grew out of them, puts the digits of a birthday into the nine palaces, counts missing numbers or names planes. Raj Yog is a Sanskrit term from Indian astrology; driver and destiny numbers belong to the vocabulary of Western and Indian numerology. Enjoy it if you like it. It is a modern Indian reading laid over a square that had already been Chinese for two thousand years.

What the Chinese tradition does with a birth date and the square is something else, and it produces one number, not a grid.

The rule is written down in the Xieji Bianfang Shu, the manual on choosing days compiled at the Qianlong emperor's order in the eighteenth century to settle what the court's almanac makers should follow. In an appendix on the nine palaces for men and women, it quotes an older text on the three cycles. Years run in cycles of sixty, three cycles to a great round. For a man, the first year of the upper cycle starts in the Kan palace, number one; the middle cycle starts at Xun, four; the lower cycle at Dui, seven; and the count runs backward through the square one year at a time. For a woman the three cycles start in the center, five, then at Kun, two, then at Gen, eight, and the count runs forward.

Then the imperial editors add a note that gives the whole thing away. The men's count, they write, is simply the star that enters the center of the square in each year: the annual star that every feng shui almanac prints in the middle of the year's chart. A man's number is the number that stood in the center of the square the year he was born. A woman's is the same walk taken the other way round, which set out from the middle in 1864.

Feng shui calls this number the kua, and it is the one number Chinese tradition takes from a birthday. Each time this page is built it checks the imperial rule against our kua number calculator and against the annual flying-star charts for every year from 1900 to 2100, and all three agree. Two details make the modern formula look odder than it is. The year turns at the Start of Spring, around February 4, so an early-February birthday may count from the year before. And a count that lands on five lands in the center, which has no trigram, so tradition hands it to men as two and to women as eight.

The oldest numbers in Chinese thought that you can take personally belong to the five phases, and they are older than any diagram. The Great Plan, the chapter Liu Xin called the Luo Writing, opens its first division with a count: one is water, two is fire, three is wood, four is metal, five is earth. The Monthly Ordinances in the Record of Rites give every season a number of its own: eight for spring, the season of wood; seven for summer and fire; five for the center and earth; nine for autumn and metal; six for winter and water.

Lay the two lists side by side and each element has a pair: one and six for water, two and seven for fire, three and eight for wood, four and nine for metal, with five alone in the middle. So eight, the famous lucky number, is also the number of spring, which has nothing to do with money and a good deal to do with things growing. Your number's trigram belongs to one of the five elements, and the calculator prints that element's pair. If you want a personal lucky number with a classical pedigree, it is the only one we can honestly give you, and neither text promised it would bring luck. They were describing how the year is put together.