What this site is, and how it works

Most feng shui online arrives as a verdict: put a plant here, never sleep there. What is missing is the step that would let you check it. Here every step is on the page. Your Kua number is shown with the trigram it stands for and the line changes that produce your four directions; a Flying Star chart is shown with its period, its facing and whether each star flew forward or in reverse.

This is not a courtesy. A reading you cannot check is a reading you have to take on faith, and there is no reason to extend that faith to a website.

Eight Mansions comes from the Bazhai Mingjing (Bright Mirror of the Eight Mansions), Flying Stars from the school of Shen Zhureng, and the almanac's layers from the Xieji Bianfang Shu (the Qing court's almanac manual); the lunar date is computed from astronomy rather than copied from a table. Feng Shui Wisdom has a whole article on the books themselves, including where two of them contradict each other and which one we follow when they do.

A printed almanac lists dozens of portents — named spirits, lucky and unlucky, said to rule a day. We compute six: the six whose rule we can state in one line and check. The page says so, rather than quietly publishing a shorter list as if it were the whole one.

The same applies wherever the data runs out. A building whose facing is measured near the boundary between two of the 24 mountains (the 24 sectors of the compass a facing is read in) could belong to either of two completely different charts, so the tool says so and tells you what would settle it, instead of picking the nearer one. If no birth hour was recorded, the chart has no hour pillar (the part of a birth chart drawn from the hour) rather than a default one.

A confidently wrong reading is worth less than one that stops and says so.

The four analysis tools are free and will stay free, with no account and no email address needed. The almanac gives away today's page in full, and the tarot three draws a day, with every card's meaning free to read. An account is free too; it exists so that you do not have to type a birth date again on every visit.

One subscription covers what people come back to again and again: the almanac for the whole month, read against your own chart, with date selection (finding the days that suit a particular undertaking); every pair on the relation web; and unlimited tarot draws. It is one subscription, and it opens all of it.

A piece is recommended only as the specific traditional object a reading names, never because it happens to share a tag with one: a reading that calls for a pixiu (a beast from Chinese legend) as an ornament placed facing the door will not be answered with a pixiu bracelet to wear. Most of the objects a reading names have no product behind them at all, and far more often than not that is the right result.

Product photographs come from the supplier the shop actually buys from: never a stock photo, and never a better-looking listing from somebody else. The claim is that each piece can be checked against what we said it is, and a photograph of someone else's goods breaks that before anything has even shipped.

Orders ship from China. Processing takes 1–3 business days and delivery 12–20 business days, so 13–23 business days in total. Shipping is included in the price — checkout charges nothing extra for it. Import duties, if they are charged on delivery, are paid by the buyer.

Those numbers are data in the code, words on the product page, and prose in the shop's published shipping policy, and all three are kept in step on purpose. If one of them ever promises you a shorter wait than another, the longer one is the honest one.

An account holds birth dates, family relationships and the direction somebody's home faces. Nothing worked out from them is stored: the Kua number, the animal sign and the directions are all recalculated on each visit, so a correction to the calculations reaches every saved person at once instead of leaving old answers behind.

Nothing personal is ever written to a server log. Account pages are not indexed by search engines. Passwords are stored as scrypt hashes, and card details are never held here: they are entered on Stripe's own pages and stay with Stripe.

There is a form at the bottom of every page for a bug report, a suggestion or a business inquiry. It goes straight to the people who build this site.