The Bagua Map: The Nine Areas and How to Overlay Them

The bagua (八卦 bāguà, "eight trigrams") map is feng shui's floor-plan tool: a three-by-three grid that divides any home into eight directional sectors plus a center, each linked to an element, a number, and an area of life. You overlay the grid on your floor plan, see which rooms fall in which sectors, and apply each sector's element rules. There are two conventions for doing the overlay, one classical and one modern Western. This page gives you the grid, the step-by-step overlay, both conventions with an honest comparison, and the mistakes that most often send people wrong.

The nine areas

The grid below is the later-heaven arrangement (後天八卦 hòutiān bāguà), the standard one for working on buildings. It is shown the way you will use it on a floor plan, with north at the bottom:

Each sector in detail:

The elements per direction are the same ones in the five elements master table; the bagua is that table folded onto a floor plan.

Where the numbers come from: the lo shu grid

The numbers 1 through 9 are the lo shu (洛書 luòshū) square, an arrangement Chinese legend says was found on the shell of a turtle emerging from the River Luo. It is a genuine magic square: every row, column, and diagonal sums to 15.

In its traditional orientation (south at the top, the Chinese map convention), it reads:

Feng shui inherits these numbers as the "stars" of each direction: 1 north, 9 south, 3 east, 7 west, and so on. For everyday bagua work you only need to know which number lives in which direction. The numbers do the heavy lifting in the flying stars system, where they move year by year; on the static bagua they stay put.

How to overlay the bagua on your floor plan

You need a floor plan, a compass (your phone's is fine), and a pencil.

1. Get a to-scale floor plan. Print one or draw one. Proportions matter, because sector boundaries come from dividing the plan evenly. Include attached garages; exclude detached structures. Multi-storey homes: start with the floor you live on most, and overlay each floor separately with the same orientation.
2. Find north. Stand at your front door facing out and take a compass reading, then mark the four cardinal directions on the plan. Step away from large metal objects and be skeptical of a reading that fights the obvious (you know roughly where the sun rises).
3. Draw the grid. Enclose the floor plan in the smallest rectangle that contains it, then divide that rectangle into nine equal parts, three by three.
4. Orient the grid by compass. Rotate the labels, not the grid: whichever cell sits in the actual north of your home gets the north labels (1, Kan, Water, career), and the rest follow around.
5. Mark what falls where. Note which rooms land in which sectors. A room can straddle two sectors; that is normal, treat each part accordingly.
6. Apply the element rules per sector. Colors and materials per sector element: see feng shui colors. For the southeast specifically, the wealth corner guide covers the classical prescriptions in depth.

Missing corners: if your plan is L-shaped, some cells of the rectangle fall outside the house. The tradition calls these missing sectors and treats them as areas the home does not naturally support. Note them; the room guides cover conventional remedies.

The two conventions, stated straight

There are two ways to orient the grid, and they give different answers. Both are real conventions with real followings, so here is the honest comparison.

The compass method (classical). The grid is oriented by actual compass directions, as in the steps above. North sector means the part of your home that faces geographic north. This is the convention of the classical compass school: eight mansions, flying stars, and the kua system all define directions this way.

The door-aligned method (BTB, Western). Black Sect Tantric Buddhist feng shui, adapted for the West in the 1980s, ignores the compass. The bottom row of the grid (knowledge, career, helpful people) is aligned with the wall containing your front door, whatever direction it faces. Walk in through the door and you always enter through the bottom of the map. It is simpler, needs no compass, and is the version most English-language decorating articles teach, usually without saying so.

Which we use, and why. This site uses the compass method, for one structural reason: everything else in classical feng shui is compass-defined. Your kua number's favorable directions, the eight mansions house types, and the annual flying stars all reference real compass directions. If your bagua is door-aligned but your kua directions are compass-based, "north" means two different things in the same house and the systems contradict each other. Pick one framework and hold it. If you prefer BTB, it works as a self-contained system, but do not mix the two overlays, and read this site's directional advice knowing it is compass-based.

Common overlay mistakes

• Mixing the conventions. The most common error by far: a door-aligned grid combined with compass-based advice from another article. Every sector label ends up meaning two things. Pick one method for the whole house.
• Guessing north instead of measuring. "The front of the house is north-ish" produces wrong sectors for every borderline room. Take the reading.
• Overlaying room by room. The classical overlay covers the whole floor first. A mini-bagua per room is a secondary refinement in some lineages, not a starting move, and doing only rooms while skipping the whole plan misses the structure.
• Forcing the grid onto an irregular plan. Use the smallest enclosing rectangle and accept missing sectors. Squeezing nine cells to fit the outline distorts every boundary.
• Ignoring scale. A not-to-scale sketch shifts sector lines by whole rooms.
• Treating sector labels as promises. The southeast is the wealth sector in the sense that the tradition assigns wealth to that direction. Arranging it well is, per the classics, supportive. It is not a mechanism for producing money, and no honest guide will tell you otherwise.

The bagua tells you about the home. The personal half of the compass school is your kua number, which tells you which of these same eight directions the tradition considers favorable for you when you sleep, work, and face the door. The kua number calculator derives it from your birth year and gender in one step.

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Sources consulted: lo shu square structure via the Luoshu Square reference literature; nine-area and trigram correspondences via the International Feng Shui Guild; the two overlay conventions via baguame.com's two-method guide and multiple BTB-method walkthroughs, compared directly. Editorial standard: classical sources first, conventions named, no outcome promises.