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.

The name of the school hides a small puzzle, and it is worth clearing up before you use your number: the eight mansions are not eight kinds of person. They are eight kinds of house. In 8 Mansions feng shui a building is sorted by the direction it sits in, its back to that direction and its face to the opposite one, which yields eight house types carrying the same trigram names the eight kua numbers carry. There is a Kan house and a Li house just as there is a kua 1 and a kua 9.

That is the entire method in a sentence. The house has a trigram; you have a trigram; the reading is the match between the two. When your number and the house belong to the same camp, East with East or West with West, the pairing is the favorable one the classical manuals are describing, and your best directions and the ones the building offers point the same way. When they do not match, nothing is ruined; the practical work simply shifts to the rooms you can control, and you arrange bed, desk and seat to face your own good directions inside whatever house you actually live in.

So there are two halves to an Eight Mansions reading, and this page does one of them. The personal half is here: your number, your group, and the four directions that belong to you for life. The building half, the eight house types and what each one asks of the people inside it, is laid out on our feng shui house design page.

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.)

Most English feng shui kua number calculators change years on January 1, and a few change at Chinese New Year. Both are wrong for this school, and the reason is worth understanding rather than taking on trust: 8 Mansions is a solar method. It rides the same twenty-four solar terms that govern the farming year and the bazi chart, so its year begins at 立春 (lìchūn), and Lichun is not a date on a calendar. It is the instant the sun reaches a particular ecliptic longitude, and astronomical almanacs give it to the minute.

In 2026 that instant is February 4 at 04:02, China Standard Time. In 1990 it was February 4 at 10:14. In 2000, February 4 at 20:40. So there is one day a year on which the date alone cannot tell you which feng shui year you belong to, and on which a person born in the morning and a person born that evening can land in different groups and get eight different directions. It is about one birthday in 365.

Which day that is depends on where you were born, which is the part almost every calculator misses. The instant is the same everywhere, but the local clock it lands on is not: Lichun 2026 is February 4 at 04:02 in Beijing and February 3 at 15:02 in New York. So a New Yorker born on February 3 at 16:00 is already in the new feng shui year, while the same date and time read against a Beijing clock looks like the old one. Counting the zones out to their extremes, the boundary can fall anywhere from February 2 to February 6 in local terms, and that is the window in which we ask for your city.

This calculator handles that case by asking rather than guessing. If your birthday falls anywhere in that window, we show you the exact moment, both candidate answers, and fields for your time and city of birth; if you don't know the hour, we say so plainly instead of picking a side. The city matters more than it looks. A calculator that compares your clock straight against the Beijing clock puts most of the world on the wrong side of the boundary, and one that only checks the Chinese calendar date never even notices the readers whose local Lichun fell the day before. We convert your reading to a real instant first, daylight saving included. If you skip the city we read the clock as China time and label the answer as such, rather than letting the assumption pass unmentioned. That is the same standard our bazi calculator holds itself to, where the hour pillar makes the stakes obvious. It seemed odd for the feng shui tool to be less careful about the same boundary.

If you want the boundary itself rather than its consequences, we have written both sides of it up: Lichun, the Start of Spring covers why the traditional year turns there and not at the New Year festival, and the twenty-four solar terms gives the whole calendar this one belongs to.

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.