Eight Mansions Feng Shui: People and Houses, Sorted the Same Way

Eight Mansions (八宅 bāzhái, "eight houses") is the classical compass school that sorts people and houses into the same two families, an East group and a West group, and reads a home as supportive when the two match. Your half of the match is your kua number (卦 guà, your personal trigram number), worked out from your birth year and gender. The house's half is its sitting direction, the compass direction its back rests against. Same group on both sides and the tradition calls it a good fit. Different groups, and the tradition asks for adjustments, never for a moving van.

The system in three steps

Eight Mansions runs on one piece of arithmetic and one compass reading. First, your birth year and gender give you a kua number, which places you in the East or West group. Second, your home's sitting direction gives it one of eight house types, which places the house in the East or West group too. Third, you compare the two. Everything else in the system, the eight named stars, the sector readings, the room placements, hangs off that comparison.

Step 1: your kua number, the person half

Your kua number is a single digit from 1 to 9 (5 excluded) that maps you to one of the eight trigrams and sorts you into a group. The kua number calculator works it out from your birth year and gender in a few seconds, including the solar-year rule for January and early February birthdays and the kua 5 convention (men who calculate to 5 use kua 2, women use kua 8).

Which of your four directions does what, and which four to avoid, is the auspicious directions chart, the personal application of this same system.

Step 2: your house type, the house half

Houses get sorted by the same eight trigrams, through the compass. Two terms do the work:

• Facing (向 xiàng) is the direction the house looks: stand inside the main doorway facing out, and the direction you look is the facing. The front door guide covers how to read it cleanly.
• Sitting (坐 zuò) is the direction directly opposite, the one the back of the house rests against. The tradition treats the sitting as the house's backbone, and it is the sitting, not the facing, that names the house.

A house takes the trigram of its sitting direction, using the same trigram-to-direction grid as the bagua map. A house that sits north is a 坎宅 (kǎn zhái, a Kan house), a house that sits southwest is a 坤宅 (kūn zhái, a Kun house), and so on through all eight. Houses whose sitting trigram belongs to the East family are the east four houses (東四宅 dōngsìzhái); the rest are the west four houses (西四宅 xīsìzhái).

The eight house types

The common mistake is reading the group off the facing. It is the sitting that decides: a 震宅 faces west, yet it is an East-four house, because it sits east. If you know only the facing, flip it to get the sitting, then read the table.

Step 3: the match

The matching logic is the simplest part of the whole school. East-group people are held to be supported by east four houses, West-group people by west four houses, because a matched house puts its favorable sectors on the same four directions your kua already favors. Within a group the individual kuas still differ, since each kua ranks the four shared directions in its own order; your exact row is in the full 8x8 chart.

Inside the house: the same eight stars, run from the house

The system has a deeper layer, and it uses machinery you may already know. The classical 大遊年 (dàyóunián) derivation that assigns your personal directions their qualities, 生氣 (shēngqì, "growth qi"), 天醫 (tiānyī, "heavenly doctor"), 延年 (yánnián, "extended years"), 伏位 (fúwèi, "settled position"), and the four to avoid, also runs from the house's trigram. Applied that way, each of the home's eight compass sectors takes a quality from the house type, and practitioners read the result to judge where the main door, the bedrooms, and the kitchen sit. What each of the eight stars means is laid out on the auspicious directions page; the house-side sector readings are a practitioner's exercise beyond this primer, and the honest advice is to get the skeleton right first: your kua, your house type, and the match.

Your house against your kua, practically

Found your kua, flipped your facing, and discovered you are an East-group person in a west four house? The tradition's own response is proportionate, and it never begins with the word "move."

• Work with what travels. Your personal directions belong to you, not the building. A bed with its head toward one of your four good directions and a desk facing another are the classical adjustments, and both fit inside any house type. The directions guide shows how.
• Mixed households are normal. Most families contain both groups, and the system has no rule against East and West people living together. The practical convention is to favor, room by room, the person who uses each spot most, each sleeper's own headboard direction, each worker's own desk facing. An older convention weights the household toward its main earner; both are compromises the tradition accepts.
• Doors matter more than paint. Where the system grades the house itself, its attention goes to openings and placements, which door you use, where you sleep, where you cook, not to redecorating. A mismatched house with a well-chosen bedroom and a well-placed desk is, by the school's own logic, most of the way there.

How Eight Mansions differs from flying stars

One honest paragraph, because the two schools are often blurred together. Eight Mansions is static: your kua is fixed for life, the house's type is fixed by its sitting, and nothing in the system changes with the calendar. Flying stars (玄空飛星 xuánkōng fēixīng, "mysterious void flying stars") is the time-based school: it reads the same compass sectors through twenty-year periods and annual charts that shift every solar year, which is why our 2026 flying stars page carries a date and this page does not. They answer different questions, the permanent fit versus the current weather, and many practitioners layer one over the other. Where the two grade a sector differently, the tradition has no single referee; this site's approach is to present each system on its own terms and tell you plainly which page uses which.

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The whole system opens with one number, and it takes ten seconds to get: the kua number calculator turns your birth year and gender into your kua, your group, and your four directions, which is everything you need to read this page against your own front door.

Eight Mansions is presented here as what it is: a classical system of orientation and fit, part of the compass tradition. It describes support and mismatch in its own vocabulary, and it makes no promises about outcomes, so neither do we.