Feng Shui Bagua Map: The Two Versions, and How to Lay One Over Your Home

Two maps, and the one question that tells them apart

Before anything else, work out which system your source is using, because everything downstream depends on it and almost nobody says which one they mean.

Ask one question: does the map move when the house is rotated?

If the answer is no, you have the compass map. The trigrams sit in real directions, north stays north, and turning the building forty degrees moves every sector. If the answer is yes, you have the door map. The grid is anchored to the main entrance, the bottom row is always the wall you walked in through, and the building could be facing any direction at all.

Neither is a fraud. The door map was built on purpose, by a real teacher, to make the system usable by people with no compass and no training, and it is internally consistent. But it is a simplification of the other one rather than a parallel tradition, and if you have been reading English feng shui writing you have almost certainly been given the door map without being told the compass map exists.

The rule that keeps you out of trouble is simple. Pick one and stay in it. The failure mode is not choosing wrong; it is running both, because then the northeast of one and the knowledge square of the other land in different rooms and you spend a weekend obeying two sets of orders.

How to actually lay one down

Both methods start the same way. Get a floor plan of the whole home, on one page, including every room under the same roof. Attached garages count. A balcony does not.

Find the center. For a rectangle that is where the diagonals cross. For anything more complicated, print it, cut it out, and balance the shape on a pencil point; the balance point is close enough, and this is genuinely how it is done.

For the compass map, take your bearing outdoors, standing back from the building, and away from cars, fuse boxes, steel and your own phone. Any of those will pull a needle several degrees, and several degrees is the difference between one sector and the next when you project the line across a house. Traditional practitioners use a luopan, a wooden disc with the trigrams and a great many other rings printed in circles around a central needle, but an ordinary compass takes the same bearing. Then lay the eight directions over the plan from the center you found, with north where north is.

For the door map, stand in the main entrance looking into the house, divide the plan into a three by three grid, and place the bottom row along the entry wall. The middle square of that bottom row is career, so the far left corner ends up as wealth and the far right as helpful people. The important word is main. It is the formal front door, the one the architect meant, even if your household has used the side door exclusively since 2019.

Four mistakes, in order of how often they happen

Aligning to the wrong door. The single commonest error, and it moves every square at once. Use the front entrance.

Taking the bearing indoors. Steel framing, wiring, appliances and phones all deflect a needle, and a compass held next to a fridge is not measuring your house. Also worth knowing: magnetic north and true north differ by up to twenty degrees depending on where in the world you are standing, which is enough to shift a sector on its own.

Panicking about a missing corner. L-shaped and irregular homes leave a square or a wedge outside the plan, and English-language writing tends to treat this as a wound. The traditional response is much calmer: you cannot conjure floor space, so you strengthen what remains of that sector, keep it clean and lit and in use, and get on with your life. A house is not a spell that fails on a technicality.

Running both systems. Covered above, and it is the one that quietly wastes the most effort.

The mirror over the door

The bagua turns up in one other place you will have seen without recognizing it.

Walk through an older neighborhood in Hong Kong or Taipei and look above the doorways. Every so often there is a small octagonal plaque with a mirror in the middle and the eight trigrams around the rim. That is a bagua mirror, and it is not decoration. It is hung to face something outside the home that the household considers hostile: a sharp roofline pointing at the window, a road running straight at the door, the corner of a taller building. The convex kind is chosen specifically because a curved surface scatters what hits it rather than sending it back.

Two things are worth knowing about them. First, the trigrams on most of these mirrors are in the Earlier Heaven arrangement, not the Later Heaven one you use for the floor plan, so a bagua mirror is not a portable version of your bagua map. Second, they are aimed at buildings, which means they are aimed at neighbors, and in dense Chinese cities the etiquette around them is genuinely fraught. Hanging one facing a neighbor's door is understood as an accusation, and it has started real disputes. If you want one, point it at a road or a rooftop, never at somebody's home.

The eight seats

Here is the whole map in one place, in the Later Heaven arrangement that feng shui uses for interiors.

Each trigram carries a natural image, a place in a family, an element and a direction. All four of those are old. The life-area labels in the last column are the modern layer, standard in practice today and not found in the classical texts, and they are what most bagua maps show you instead of everything else.

The center is the ninth position, the one the grid gives no trigram, and it is read as the overall health of the household. Keeping it open and uncluttered is the oldest advice in the system and the least glamorous.

If you want to go deeper on any single seat, our colors guide works from the same eight directions and assigns the palettes by element, and the wealth corner page takes the southeast apart in detail, including the one piece of advice about it that almost every English source has backward.

Where the map comes from

Now the roots, which are considerably older and stranger than the nine squares.

The eight trigrams are the base unit of the Book of Changes, and the text that puts them in directions is the Shuo Gua, one of the classical commentaries. It gives two orders.

The first is the arrangement traditionally credited to Fuxi, the mythical culture hero, and it is built entirely out of opposites: heaven and earth take their positions, mountain and lake circulate their air, thunder and wind press on each other, water and fire do not shoot at one another, and the eight trigrams interlock. That is a description of a balanced cosmos rather than a floor plan, and it is called the Earlier Heaven arrangement.

The second is credited to King Wen of Zhou and reads as a journey. The god comes forth in Zhen, it says, sets things in order in Xun, they see one another in Li, receive their tasks in Kun, speak their joy in Dui, do battle in Qian, labor in Kan, and complete their words in Gen. That is a circuit through the eight directions, and the same commentary anchors it to the compass in plain terms: Li is brightness, where the ten thousand things all see one another, the trigram of the south; Kan is water, the trigram of due north.

This second one is the Later Heaven arrangement, and it is the one feng shui builds on. The reason is practical rather than mystical. The Earlier Heaven order is about how the world is structured; the Later Heaven order is about how it moves through the seasons and the compass, and if you are siting a house you need the second kind of information.

Everything else stacks on that. The Eight Mansions school takes those same eight seats and sorts them into two families of four, which is where your own favorable directions come from. The flying star school runs the same eight positions through a shifting numerical cycle. The nine-square grid in the Western books flattens the whole thing into something you can do with a printout. They are all reading the same octagon.

Your own four directions

The map tells you what each part of the house is for. It does not tell you which parts suit you, and that is a separate calculation with a different input.

Read together, they are two layers rather than two opinions. The bagua gives the sector its subject; your kua number tells you which of those eight seats your own chart treats as favorable, and it will not be the same set as your partner's. A household where two people have different families is completely ordinary, and the standard answer is to split the rooms rather than argue about the front door.

Start with the center of the plan and one honest bearing. Everything else on this page is downstream of getting those two right.