The Twelve Palaces of Zi Wei Dou Shu, Explained
Updated 2026-08-02
All twelve palaces at a glance
The palaces always appear in the same sequence. Counting from the Life Palace, the order is fixed for everyone — what changes from person to person is which part of the grid the Life Palace lands in, and which stars fall where.
| Palace | Chinese | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Life Palace | 命宫 | Your core self: temperament, instincts, how you meet the world. Read first. |
| Siblings | 兄弟宫 | Brothers and sisters, and by extension your peers and close collaborators. |
| Spouse | 夫妻宫 | Marriage and long-term partnership — both who you attract and how you behave inside a relationship. |
| Children | 子女宫 | Children, and traditionally also what you create and pass on. |
| Wealth | 财帛宫 | Income, cash flow, and your relationship with money as it moves. |
| Health | 疾厄宫 | Constitution, vulnerabilities, and how stress shows up in the body. |
| Travel | 迁移宫 | Movement, being away from home, and how the outside world treats you. |
| Friends | 仆役宫 / 交友宫 | Networks, colleagues, subordinates — the people around you rather than the people close to you. |
| Career | 官禄宫 / 事业宫 | Work, status, and the shape of your professional life. |
| Property | 田宅宫 | Home, land, and accumulated assets — wealth at rest rather than in motion. |
| Inner Life | 福德宫 | Mental and emotional weather: what you enjoy, what you worry about, what gives you peace. |
| Parents | 父母宫 | Parents and elders, and your relationship with authority in general. |
The Life Palace is not just one of twelve
The Life Palace (命宫) is the anchor of the entire chart. Its stars describe your baseline temperament, and every other palace is positioned relative to it, so a practitioner reads it before anything else.
If your Life Palace has no major star in it — which happens fairly often — it is read together with the palace directly opposite. That is not a defect in the chart. It usually describes someone whose character is drawn out by circumstances and by the people around them rather than fixed from the start.
The Body Palace: what your life ends up being about
Alongside the twelve, Zi Wei Dou Shu has a Body Palace (身宫), which overlaps whichever of the twelve it falls in. It is not a thirteenth box.
The usual distinction: the Life Palace is what you are born as, and the Body Palace is what you spend your life working on. When the Body Palace sits in the Career Palace, work is the arena the life gets organised around. When it sits in the Inner Life Palace, the real work is internal — peace of mind is the project.
Palaces are never read in isolation
This is the part most English-language introductions leave out. A palace is always read together with three others: the palace directly opposite it, and the two palaces at the triangle points. In Chinese this group is called san fang si zheng (三方四正) — "three sides and four corrects."
The practical consequence is that a difficult star in your Wealth Palace is not read as a verdict on your finances. It is weighed against the three palaces that face it, and a strong palace opposite can change the reading entirely. Any reading that quotes one palace to you in isolation is skipping the actual method.
Which palaces to look at first
For a first reading, four palaces carry most of the useful information: the Life Palace for who you are, the Body Palace for what your life keeps circling back to, the Career Palace for how you work, and the Inner Life Palace for what actually settles or unsettles you.
The Spouse and Wealth palaces are the two people ask about most, but they are also the two most often misread on their own, precisely because of the triangle rule above.
Enter your birth date, time and city. You get your chart and a short, direct reading — free, no account.
Cast my free chart →Questions
The twelve palaces are Life (命宫), Siblings (兄弟), Spouse (夫妻), Children (子女), Wealth (财帛), Health (疾厄), Travel (迁移), Friends (仆役), Career (官禄), Property (田宅), Inner Life (福德) and Parents (父母). Each covers one department of life, and they always appear in this fixed order.
The Life Palace (命宫). It describes your core self and anchors the whole chart — every other palace is positioned relative to it, so it is always read first.
An empty Life Palace has no major star in it, which is common and not a problem. It is read together with the palace directly opposite, and usually describes someone whose character is shaped by circumstances and company rather than fixed from birth.
The Life Palace (命宫) describes what you are born as — your baseline temperament. The Body Palace (身宫) describes what your life ends up being about, the area you spend your energy on. The Body Palace always overlaps one of the twelve palaces rather than occupying its own box.