金 Metal in a bazi chart

Colours

Your governing element is 金 Metal, and the tradition assigns to it the colours of things that have been finished: white, and the metals themselves.

Principal — Pearl White #D8D4CC · Silver #A9A9A6 · Bone #EDE7DA Secondary — Ochre #B7862F · Amber #D9A441, because 土生金, Earth generates Metal. Ore comes out of ground, and the classics keep the yellows near the whites for that reason rather than for contrast. Sparing — Cinnabar #B03A2E · Ember #D9614F. 火剋金 — Fire overcomes Metal. The texts do not forbid red; they say that fire in excess does not temper this metal, it scars it.

《周禮·考工記》 gives the correspondence in three characters: 西方謂之白 — "of the west it is said, white." Metal's direction is west, its season is autumn, and its colour is the white of bone and porcelain rather than the white of new paint.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. 金曰從革 — "Metal is said to yield and be reshaped" (《尚書·洪範》). The colour of Metal in the old texts is the colour of the finished object, not of the raw ore and not of a blank surface. Bone white has age in it. Optical white has none.

In practice this is one of the easier elements to serve, because most of it is subtraction. Fewer things, paler, harder — a bare surface, an undyed cloth, one worked object rather than three decorative ones.

Materials

The materials the tradition assigns to 金 Metal are the worked ones — things that have been cut, refined, or fired past the point of return.

Stone — white jade 白玉 · clear quartz 白水晶 · howlite 白紋石 Worked — brass 黃銅 · silver 銀 · porcelain 瓷

《尚書·洪範》 states the phase as 金曰從革 — "Metal is said to yield and to be reshaped." The two verbs matter equally. Metal in this system is not hardness; it is the substance that submits to work and then holds the shape it was given. That is the common property of everything on the list.

Porcelain belongs here rather than with Earth because of one number: the temperature. Clay fired past roughly 1,300 degrees vitrifies — it stops being porous, rings when struck, and will no longer take water. The tradition drew that line long before anyone could measure it, and put the result in the Metal column.

Between silver and brass, the classical preference is silver for anything worn against the skin and brass for anything placed in a room. 辛金軟弱，溫潤而清 — "Xin metal is soft, warm and clear" (《滴天髓》), and the texts consistently associate the finer metal with the body and the heavier one with the house.

What the tradition avoids for a Metal element is not a material but a condition: raw, unfinished, unpolished. Rough stone in its natural state reads as Earth here, not as Metal.

Numbers

Your numbers are 4 and 9.

They come from the 河圖, the diagram behind the 繫辭 arithmetic, which gives every phase two numbers instead of one: 地四生金，天九成之 — "Earth's four gives birth to Metal; Heaven's nine completes it."

The pair is not redundant. 4 is the 生數, the generating number — the ore, the material before it has been worked. 9 is the 成數, the completing number — the same phase finished, and in the older numerology the largest of the single digits and the one associated with the imperial. The tradition uses 4 for what is being begun and 9 for what is meant to stand.

There is an obvious complication and it is worth naming directly. In Mandarin and in several other East Asian languages, 四 is close in sound to 死, and buildings across the region skip the fourth floor for that reason. That is a homophone taboo, not a five-phase judgement, and the two systems disagree. 河圖 arithmetic predates the taboo by a long way and assigns 4 to Metal without comment. You are free to decide which system you are following; the classics being cited here are following the older one.

Where a number is not yours to choose, reduce rather than worry. 49 carries both. 27 carries neither.

The numbers working against Metal are 2 and 7, which belong to Fire.

When metal is thin in the chart

Counted by phase, metal is thin, and metal is your Day Master's phase. The element the reading rests on is the one least represented.

Mechanically the Self is under-supplied. Earth produces metal, and other metal in the chart stands with it; where both are light the reading is 身弱, a Self that leans. That reverses the ordinary sense of the later sections, because a leaning Self is served by support and taxed by output, so what looks like opportunity elsewhere may read here as cost.

The 《洪範》 definition 《五行大義》 opens from is 「金曰從革」 — metal is said to yield and to be reshaped. Of the five that is the only one defined by submitting to work. Thin metal still yields; there is simply less of it, so each reshaping takes proportionally more out.

None of this is a judgement. A light phase is a shape, and the literature is full of light Selves that work extremely well.

Which phase is wholly absent, and what that absence points at, is a separate section.

When metal sits evenly among the rest

Across your eight characters no phase runs away with the count, and metal — your own — sits level with the rest.

This is the least eventful reading this section produces, and the most frequently inflated. An even count does not describe an even person. It describes a chart with no dominant lever: nothing so heavy that its removal changes the picture, nothing so thin that supplying it does. The judgement of strength therefore falls to the month pillar, and the section after this one matters more for you than this one does.

「金曰從革」 — metal yields and is reshaped, from 《尚書·洪範》 at the head of 《五行大義》. Even metal is material that is available to be worked without being either raw or already finished.

The working consequence is that your governing element is chosen by season rather than by shortage — the 調候 route rather than the 抑扶 route. It asks what the month is short of, not what the count is short of, and the answers are less obvious.

The count is the count. Interpretation comes later.

When metal dominates

Metal is the largest group among your eight characters, and metal is your Day Master's own phase.

The method reads a surplus of one's own phase as a question of where it goes, not of how much power it confers. It looks for an outlet — water, which metal produces — and for a check, which is fire. With neither available in quantity, the chart holds a Self in excess with no route out, and the classics treat that as the harder of the two extremes.

「金曰從革」, the 《洪範》 line 《五行大義》 works from: metal yields and is reshaped. Where metal is heavy there is a great deal to reshape and often nothing doing the reshaping, and an unworked surplus of metal is simply ore.

Two boundaries on this reading. A heavy count is not a forceful character. And a dominant own-phase does not settle whether the Self is strong, because the month pillar can override a count entirely — the subject of the next section.

This section gives the shape and stops there.