About Five Elements of You

What we're building

Five Elements of You is an English-first introduction to BaZi, the Chinese Four Pillars, for people who are curious about Chinese culture and personality systems but don't read classical Chinese. We want the first reading someone gets to be clear, accurate and respectful of where the tradition comes from.

Chinese terms stay in the reading as cultural markers, always with plain English beside them. You'll see 木 next to Wood and 甲 next to Jia, because the characters are part of what makes the system what it is.

How your chart is calculated

Your four pillars are calculated deterministically: the same birth details always produce the same chart. We use the Chinese solar calendar, so the year changes at Lichun (the start of spring, around February 4) and each month begins at its exact solar term, computed astronomically rather than taken from a fixed date table.

Your birth time is treated as the local clock time where you were born. We resolve that place's historical UTC offset, including daylight saving where it applied, before checking solar-term boundaries. We don't currently apply true-solar-time correction, and we say so in the advanced details of every chart.

If you don't know your birth time, we don't guess. You get a three-pillar chart with the hour pillar left open. If you only know it roughly, we check thirty minutes either side and show both possible hour pillars when the window crosses a boundary.

Hidden stems, Ten Gods, stem and branch interactions and five-element counts are all derived from the calculated chart. The engine is covered by regression tests on known charts, including births that fall right on a solar-term boundary.

Where the interpretations come from

Each of the ten Day Masters is introduced with its four-line description from the Di Tian Sui (滴天髓), one of the core classical BaZi texts, alongside a short English bridge. The archetype names and taglines (The Pioneer, The Quiet Rain and the rest) are our fixed, editorial translation of those classical images and never change from reading to reading.

The personalized parts of your reading are written by an AI language model working from your calculated chart and our fixed knowledge base. The chart itself is never generated by AI, and once a reading is written for a chart it is saved, so the same chart doesn't drift.

What we won't do

No fatalism. A BaZi chart describes tendencies and seasons, not a fixed destiny. We don't make predictions about health, wealth or relationships ending.

No remedies to buy. We frame the five elements as modes of energy and behavior: Wood as growth, Metal as boundaries, Water as movement. When a chart is out of balance, our suggestions are changes in how you act, never crystals, colors, accessories, lucky numbers or anything to eat.

No birth data on share cards. Your archetype card is designed to be shared and contains nothing that identifies when or where you were born.

Your data

We store your birth details so your reading is there when you come back and so we can email your full report. You can ask us to delete them at any time. The details are in our Privacy Policy.

Learn more

If you're new to BaZi, start with What is BaZi? and What is a Day Master?, then explore the five elements and the ten Day Masters. Questions, corrections or feedback are always welcome at report@fiveelementsofyou.app.