Support

I don't know what time I was born. Can I still use this?

Yes, with a caveat. The date gives you three of the four pillars — year, month and day — and those carry most of the reading. Only the hour pillar needs the time.

If you leave the time at the default 12:00 you will get a chart, but treat the hour pillar as a guess rather than a fact. Better: open Find my hour (推時法) on the home page. It walks you through the traditional method of narrowing an unknown hour — cross-checking family accounts, birth order, physical marks and life events against the twelve branches — and tells you which hours remain plausible instead of inventing one for you. It will not always produce a single answer, and when it can't, it says so.

Your site says I'm a different animal than every other site. Which one is wrong?

Neither, exactly — you are looking at two different questions.

The "zodiac animal" most sites give you is the animal of the lunar new year, which falls somewhere between late January and late February. The bazi year pillar does not change then. It changes at 立春 — the solar term "start of spring" — which lands on 3, 4 or 5 February depending on the year.

So if you were born in the window between those two dates, the calendar in your kitchen and the chart on this page will disagree. Roughly one birthday in ten falls in that window, which means a large number of people have been told an animal that their four-pillar chart does not use. If that is you, the chart here is the one a bazi practitioner would work from.

What is "true solar time", and why did it move my hour pillar?

Clock time is a political convenience. Everyone inside a time zone agrees to pretend the sun is overhead at the same moment, and in some countries the zone is enormous — all of China runs on Beijing time, so noon on the clock in Kashgar is nearly two hours away from noon in the sky.

The hour pillar is defined by where the sun actually is, not by what the clock says. So we do two corrections. First, longitude: four minutes of solar time for every degree you sit east or west of your zone's meridian. Second, the equation of time: the sun runs up to about sixteen minutes ahead of or behind mean time depending on the date, because the Earth's orbit is elliptical and its axis is tilted.

Together those can shift you by well over an hour. If your birth time sat near the boundary between two of the twelve two-hour branches, that shift moves you into the neighbouring branch — and your hour pillar changes. We also apply the historical daylight-saving rules for your birthplace, which is another common source of an hour's error.

I was born between 23:00 and 23:59. Why did you give me two charts?

Because the tradition never settled the question, and we would rather show you the disagreement than hide it.

The 子 hour runs from 23:00 to 01:00, so it straddles midnight. One school treats the whole of it as belonging to the next day — the day pillar advances at 23:00 (this is the 早子時 reading). The other splits it: 23:00–00:00 keeps the current day's pillar as a "late 子" hour (夜子時), and only after midnight does the day pillar advance.

These give two different day pillars, and the day pillar is the day master — the single most important character in the chart. There is no way to pick one for you without pretending to a certainty nobody has. So you get both, labelled, and you decide which lineage you are reading in.

Is this accurate? Is this fortune telling?

Two separate questions, so two separate answers.

The calculation is accurate and checkable. Solar terms are computed from apparent solar longitude at 15° steps for the years 1899–2100, and cross-checked against published almanac values. If you find a term date that disagrees with an authoritative source, tell us — that is a bug and we will fix it.

The interpretation is a description, not a prediction. What the reading tells you is what the classical system says about a chart shaped like yours, and which text it says it in. We cite the source for every section on purpose. We do not claim those texts are correct about the world, we do not promise outcomes, and we do not think your future is fixed. Nobody knows whether it is. Read it as a well-documented account of what a nine-hundred-year-old body of thought would make of your birth moment — that is genuinely interesting, and it is also all we are claiming.

YIBAGUA is not a medical, legal, psychological or financial service. Do not use it to make decisions that need one.

Where does my data go?

Nowhere. Your birth date, birth time and birth place never leave your device — the chart is computed by JavaScript already loaded in the page, so there is no request to send them in. We set no cookies and use no localStorage. Analytics are aggregate page counts through Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookie-free.

The full account is on the Privacy page.

How do I keep or share my chart?

Because we store nothing, there is no saved-charts list and no shareable link that would encode your birth data. Screenshot the page, or use your browser's print-to-PDF — the layout is built to print cleanly. Reloading the page clears the chart.

I paid for a reading. How long does it take, and how does it reach me?

Checkout runs through Stripe. Delivery goes to the email address you enter at checkout, so check that it is one you can actually open — a typo there is the single most common reason an order appears to go missing. Look in spam and promotions before you write to us.

If the expected delivery window has passed and nothing has arrived, email us with the address you used and the approximate time of purchase and we will find the order and resend it.

Can I get a refund?

Yes. If a paid item did not arrive, arrived broken, or is not what the page said it was, write to us and we will refund it — you do not have to argue the point. Refunds go back to the original card through Stripe and typically take five to ten business days to appear, which is Stripe's and your bank's timing, not ours.

We will not refund on the grounds that you disagree with the interpretation. The site says up front that it describes what a classical system says rather than predicting events, and that is the thing being sold.

The page won't load, or the chart looks broken.

Try these in order. Hard-reload the page (Ctrl-Shift-R, or Cmd-Shift-R on a Mac). Turn off any script-blocking extension for this domain — the entire calculation is JavaScript, so blocking it leaves you with an empty result. Use a current version of Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge; very old browsers lack features the engine relies on.

If the city you were born in is missing from the lookup, pick the nearest city in the same time zone and at a similar longitude — the correction depends on longitude, so a neighbouring city a few tenths of a degree away changes nothing. If it still misbehaves, send us your browser, your device and what you typed, and we will reproduce it.

Can I use the charts or the text somewhere else?

Your own chart is yours — screenshot it, print it, post it. The written interpretations, the card art and the engine are ours; please don't republish them wholesale or feed them into another product. If you want to quote a passage or write about the site, that is fine, and a link back is appreciated. For anything larger, ask.

How do I contact you?

Email [EMAIL — michael 填]. One person reads it, so allow a couple of days. If you are reporting a calculation error, include the birth date, birth time and city you entered plus what you expected — that is enough to reproduce it exactly.