Civil time · continuous Zi hour · v1.0.0
The project owner approved this version on 6 September 2026 and explicitly chose continuous Zi at 23:00. The clock and rollover choices below are product conventions; they are not conclusions forced by the book.
- Year
- Exact Beginning of Spring (Li Chun) instant; not Lunar New Year.
- Month
- Exact instants of the twelve jie terms; the incoming month includes the boundary instant.
- Day
- 23:00 recorded local civil time starts the next sexagenary day.
- Hour
- Zi is [23:00, 01:00); all other double-hours are left-inclusive. Zi uses the same next-day stem throughout.
- Clock
- Recorded local civil time, including the historical civil offset and daylight-saving rules. DST is not subtracted a second time.
- Solar time
- No longitude or true-solar-time adjustment.
- Location
- Same astronomical term sequence worldwide; no six-month hemisphere reversal.
For example, 18 February at 23:30 and 19 February at 00:30 share the same day pillar and Zi-hour pillar. Midnight does not split Zi. At 01:00, the hour changes to Chou while the day remains the same.
What happens when the record is uncertain?
- Missing time: no complete chart is invented.
- A skipped clock time: calculation stops. A repeated clock time: choose the documented earlier or later occurrence.
- Approximate time: we check the stated ±15, ±30 or ±60-minute civil-clock interval. If any pillar changes, or the interval includes a clock discontinuity, no single chart is assigned.
- Within two minutes of a computed year/month boundary: the chart is held for independent timing review. This caution window is not a certified astronomical error bound.
Supported Gregorian dates are 1901–2100. The corresponding astronomical reference year and the uncertainty interval must also be in range. Pre-1970 local time histories and births close to boundaries need particular care. Confirm the birthplace’s IANA time zone; we do not infer it from a city name.
Sources, with their limits.
San Ming Tong Hui, local work NLC416-13jh000156-94145, source-file pages 109–110: the year stem determines the first month’s stem, and the day stem determines the first hour’s stem. These are file-page numbers, not printed folio numbers. The scan and a separate digital transcription of volume two were compared for these mappings. That transcription is corroboration, not a critical edition or an independent human sign-off.
- Month starts · page 109
- For year stems Jia/Ji, Yi/Geng, Bing/Xin, Ding/Ren, Wu/Gui, the Yin month begins with Bing, Wu, Geng, Ren, Jia respectively. The raw translation’s Yi/Geng error has a separate correction record; the raw passage is preserved.
- Hour starts · page 110
- For day stems Jia/Ji, Yi/Geng, Bing/Xin, Ding/Ren, Wu/Gui, Zi begins with Jia, Bing, Wu, Geng, Ren respectively. Subsequent double-hours advance through the stems.
The Hong Kong Observatory’s February 2026 almanac labels 19 February as Jia-Zi (甲子). Its day labels provide an external day-cycle check. Its Lunar New Year labels are not used to decide our BaZi year boundary.
Solar-term instants come from pinned lunar-javascript 1.7.7, using a fixed UTC+08:00 astronomical reference converted to UTC. Sample checks use HKO’s 2016 solar terms and 2026 table. Historical offsets use Moment Timezone 0.6.3 and the full IANA 2026c database. These checks do not certify every date or locality in the supported range.
A deliberately limited first release.
Four Pillars and stem labels only; no hidden-stem weighting, luck cycles, destiny scores or predictions. Passing numerical tests does not establish predictive accuracy. Targeted translation reviews remain labelled AI-source-checked, pending human review; uncertain material has not been promoted into executable rules.
Private birth entry.
Calculation takes place in this browser. The calculator does not send raw birth inputs to a server or store them in cookies, links, browser storage or your journal. No name, gender, email or account is required. Clear removes the form and chart state, not your browser’s own history or autofill. On a shared device, use a private window and close it afterward.
The separate I Ching journal has its own cookie-based saving workflow. It does not receive these birth details. No advertising tracker or payment request is loaded for this basic chart.
Source-led readings, separate from the calculation.
The free report explains the day reference, visible stem count, polarity and solar-month context. The deeper report adds phase relationships, pillar comparisons and a guided reflection. It uses one existing report credit; ad access is not available. Neither report adds hidden-stem weights, favorable elements, luck cycles or predictions to the calculation method.
If you choose to keep a report while signed in, we store only the four derived stem/branch pairs, method and report versions, creation time and access status. We do not send the birth form. A derived chart may still reveal information about birth timing, so it is protected as private account data. Delete or download it from your journal.
Read the source notes and translation limits
Selected extracts from San Ming Tong Hui (三命通會), work NLC416-13jh000156-94145, exported from our local research database. Pages are source-file scan pages. AI-checked excerpts still await human scholarly review. The full book is not certified by these checks.
Scan page 211 · day
八字以日爲主。
In the Eight Characters, the day is the principal reference.
A second location supports the day-centered explanation. This review approves neither the surrounding predictions nor the historical attributions. No complete chart algorithm follows from this sentence alone.
Passage IDs: 21125, 21127 · Review: sanming-bazi-v1-211-day-reference
Read the original draft page in context →The preserved page draft can differ from the corrected excerpt above.
Scan page 110 · pillars
凡論人命，年月日時排成四柱。遁月從年，則以年爲本；遁時從日，則以日爲主。古法以年看，子平以日看，本此。
In this method of considering a life, year, month, day, and hour are arranged as Four Pillars. Deriving the month from the year makes the year the basis; deriving the hour from the day makes the day the principal reference. The older methods take the year as their reference, while Ziping takes the day: this is the basis of that distinction.
The supplied English merges the contrast between the older year-based methods and the day-based Ziping method. Punctuation in the checked Chinese is editorial. This is evidence of the book's distinction, not independent historical verification of all schools.
Passage IDs: 20698, 20701 · Review: sanming-bazi-v1-110-traditions
Read the original draft page in context →The preserved page draft can differ from the corrected excerpt above.
Scan page 87 · polarity
各有一陰一陽，如甲便是木之陽，乙便是木之陰。
Each has a yin and a yang aspect: Jia is the yang aspect of Wood, and Yi its yin aspect.
This short example supports the Jia/Yi distinction. The surrounding passage debates different explanations; this review does not certify every correspondence or resolve those differences.
Passage IDs: 20607, 20608 · Review: sanming-bazi-v1-087-yin-yang
Read the original draft page in context →The preserved page draft can differ from the corrected excerpt above.
Scan page 97 · months
七月申：立秋、處暑。
Seventh month, Shen: Beginning of Autumn and End of Heat.
The visual table gives two solar terms per month. OCR flattened this structure and the translation omitted the paired terms; for Shen it selected the second term instead of the first. The complete term-pair reconstruction below excludes all day-allocation figures. Those figures and variant schemes need further collation and must not be turned into universal weights. These pairs do not on their own settle exact modern pillar-boundary or time-zone policy.
Passage IDs: 20648, 20650 · Review: sanming-bazi-v1-097-solar-pairs
Read the original draft page in context →The preserved page draft can differ from the corrected excerpt above.
Scan page 112 · calendar
有二月而得三月節氣。
There are cases in the second month that receive the solar term of the third month.
二月 and 三月 are numbered months in the text's calendrical context, not the Gregorian names February and March. The preceding paragraph discusses Beginning of Spring occurring in the twelfth month. It supports distinguishing solar terms from a numbered calendar month but does not provide modern UTC calculations. The adjoining fortune and lifespan assertions are historical doctrine, not approved website predictions.
Passage IDs: 20708, 20709 · Review: sanming-bazi-v1-112-numbered-months
Read the original draft page in context →The preserved page draft can differ from the corrected excerpt above.
Scan page 25 · cycles
水流趨東以生木也；鑽木取火，木所生也；披沙揀金，土所生也；水西而東，金所生也；長於夏末，火所生也。土得木而達；水得土而絕；火得水而滅；金得火而缺；木得金而伐。
Selected examples describe Water generating Wood, Wood generating Fire, Earth generating Metal, Metal generating Water, and Fire generating Earth. The closing examples describe Wood acting on Earth, Earth stopping Water, Water extinguishing Fire, Fire altering Metal, and Metal cutting Wood.
Narrow editorial rendering of selected clauses; punctuation added. AI visual comparison with archived scan p25 on 2026-09-09, not human scholarly review. The raw English control paragraph has a suspect sequence and is not used. These are historical symbolic relationships, not scientific mechanisms.
Passage IDs: 20339 · Review: site-bazi-report-2026-09-09-p25
Read the original draft page in context →The preserved page draft can differ from the corrected excerpt above.