Your year,
month by month.

The year starts at 立春, not on 1 January

The year this page reads does not begin on 1 January. A saju year runs from 立春 — the start of spring in the solar-term calendar, in early February — to the next 立春, and the twelve months laid out here are the solar-term months 寅 through 丑, in that order.

So a reading for 2026 opens with the 寅 month, which begins at 立春 in February 2026, and closes with the 丑 month, which mostly covers January 2027. One thing the cards themselves do not tell you: the "Jan" on the twelfth card is the following January. Each card prints a month name and no year, so that last one has to be read across the turn of the calendar. Read the other way round: if you open this page in January and ask for the year you are in, the January you are standing in belongs to the previous saju year and is not the first card. The form offers the current year and the next one, so a year can be read before it begins.

The year's own stem and branch are taken from a date well away from the boundary. 立春 turns over at an instant rather than on a date, so reading the year pillar from the day beside it would let the handling of a single hour decide which year you were shown. The reading therefore anchors on noon on 1 June of that year, a point on neither side of the line. Your own chart is handled differently: its year and month pillars are judged only after your birth instant has been converted to the Asia/Shanghai reference clock, and that conversion is written out on the methodology page.

Where the twelve months come from

None of the twelve is chosen by hand. For each month the code takes one point well inside it — the 20th at noon, far enough from the solar term that moves the month — and asks the calendar which month pillar was in force then. The stem and branch that come back are the two characters printed on the card.

The calendar name on the card, February or March, is the calendar month that solar-term month mostly covers. It is there to be readable. The two do not line up exactly: the few days around a month change can belong to the card beside it, and this page does not work out the hour at which each month turns over.

Of the two characters, only the upper one, the stem, decides the month's ten-god. The lower one, the branch, is converted to its element and drives the closing sentence about the backdrop of the month. That is why two months sharing a ten-god do not end on the same line.

What makes a month favourable or one for care

Two values decide the tone, and nothing else does. The first is the relation between your day master — the stem of the day you were born — and that month's stem. There are ten such relations, the ten gods, and here they are folded into five families: self, output, wealth, authority and resource.

The second is whether your day master is supported. The engine adds up the weight of everything in your chart that shares your day master's element or produces it, adds 8 if the season of your birth month is that same element and 5 if it produces it, and 3 for each pillar rooted in it. Divided by the chart's total weight with those same two additions, 60 per cent or more is read as heavily supported, under 40 as lightly supported, and anything between as balanced. "Weight" is our decision too: each visible stem and branch counts 2, and each stem hidden inside a branch counts 1. That counting is the floor the whole sum stands on, so it belongs here beside the 60 and the 40 and the 8, 5 and 3, rather than buried.

The two are then combined. A lightly supported day master takes self and resource months as favourable and the rest as months for care; a heavily supported one reads the reverse. That much is 抑扶 (eokbu) — a weak day master welcomes support, a strong one welcomes output — and the code names it as such. What to do with the middle case is ours, not the tradition's: for a balanced day master we take output and wealth months as favourable, authority months as ones for care, and self and resource months as steady. We separate it out here rather than letting it shelter under the same name. The summary at the top of the page is produced by the same rule, from the year's stem against your day master. "Take care" means the month asks for a different approach — it is not a bad month.

Which means the free reading takes exactly two things from your chart: your day master, and that support verdict. Two people who share both get the same twelve cards for the same year. Each card is one entry drawn from each of five tables — the family, the tone, one thing to practise, one thing to watch, and the branch's backdrop — joined in that order. The year summary is built the same way, from the family table and a second table written for the year. That is why the free reading returns the same answer to the same input every time: there is no model call anywhere in it. The paid part of this same page is the exception — that one is written by a language model, working from the numbers and pillars computed here.

What the fields do, and what this cannot do

Birth time is optional. Without it no hour pillar is set and noon is assumed, which changes what there is to count and can change the support verdict described above. Since that verdict flips the tone of all twelve months at once, the same year can come out as a different set of twelve depending on whether the time is filled in. The hour pillar is left out rather than guessed.

The other fields all move the chart the twelve cards are built from. Choosing the lunar calendar, leap month included, converts your date to its solar equivalent before any pillar is set. The timezone decides which instant on Earth your clock time was, and for a birth near a solar term that one field can move your year or month pillar to the neighbouring one. True solar time is an optional correction, off by default, and it only applies when a birth time is known. It moves the day and hour pillars; the year and month pillars are judged from the uncorrected instant. Since the day pillar carries your day master, turning it on can change all twelve cards through that.

Gender is optional too, and the twelve free months never look at it: leaving it unanswered changes nothing in the twelve cards. It is not, though, a side question. Without it there is no ten-year luck cycle at all — not merely no direction, but no starting age, and no age or year range for any of its pillars, because all of that follows from this one field. The paid reading has a section that places the year inside that cycle, so leaving it blank changes that section into one about how the year meets your natal chart instead.

And this is a calculation, not a prediction. A month marked for care says one thing only: that the relation between its stem and your day master points at holding rather than pushing. It is not a claim that anything will happen, and we would not make one. Used sensibly, it is a way of deciding in advance which months to plan effort into and which to leave lighter.