Which corner is the feng shui wealth corner?
Published 2026-08-20
There are two answers because there are two systems. In the three-door bagua the wealth area is a fixed cell of a grid lined up with your front door — the far-left corner as you walk in, in every home. In Eight Mansions there is no wealth corner at all; the nearest equivalent is the Sheng Chi (生氣) sector, and it comes from a compass bearing for the building or from a person’s birth year, so it moves from home to home and from person to person.
Neither answer is the other one stated differently. In the same house they routinely point at opposite corners, and the version you have probably read — “your southeast corner” — is a splice of the two.
Where “southeast” comes from
The three-door grid attaches a trigram to each of its nine areas, and the one on the wealth area is Xun (巽). In the compass school Xun’s own seat is the southeast. So the sentence “the wealth area is Xun” is true inside the three-door system, and the sentence “Xun sits in the southeast” is true inside the compass system, and joining them produces “your southeast corner is your wealth corner”, which is not a statement either system makes.
The two halves are each correct. The join is what fails.
The three-door answer: a fixed cell
The three-door bagua, taught in the West since the 1980s and often called BTB or Black Sect, lays nine squares over your floor plan and lines them up with the wall your front door is in. The front door always opens into the career strip, and the far row is wealth, fame and love from left to right. So the wealth area is the far-left corner from your entrance, and it is that corner in every home ever built.
What moves is which physical corner that is. Our bagua map rotates the grid with the door wall, so the wealth cell lands in a different part of the building depending on where you come in. The area itself carries the Wood element, is also called prosperity or abundance, and is associated with purple and green. The advice this tradition gives for it is plain: keep it uncluttered and keep it well lit.
Because nothing here depends on a bearing, the method needs only a plan and a door. That is its appeal and also its limit — two identically shaped homes with the door in the same wall get identical readings no matter which way either one points.
The compass answer: a sector, twice over
Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai) does not divide a home into life areas. It divides it into eight sectors of 45° and sorts them into four favored and four weak. Only one of the four favored stars carries a prosperity theme, and that is Sheng Chi. It is the closest thing this school has to a wealth corner, and it is computed twice from two different inputs.
From the building. The house is named after the direction it sits in, which is the opposite of the direction it faces.
| The front faces | House | Sheng Chi sector |
|---|---|---|
| North | Li house (離宅) | East |
| Northeast | Kun house (坤宅) | Northeast |
| East | Dui house (兌宅) | Northwest |
| Southeast | Qian house (乾宅) | West |
| South | Kan house (坎宅) | Southeast |
| Southwest | Gen house (艮宅) | Southwest |
| West | Zhen house (震宅) | South |
| Northwest | Xun house (巽宅) | North |
From the person. The same arithmetic run from a birth year instead of a building gives that person’s own Sheng Chi direction.
| Kua number | Sheng Chi direction |
|---|---|
| 1 | Southeast |
| 2 | Northeast |
| 3 | South |
| 4 | North |
| 6 | West |
| 7 | Northwest |
| 8 | Southwest |
| 9 | East |
The compass bagua map computes both layers side by side, and the Kua number calculator does the personal one on its own.
Two notes on those tables. They are not interchangeable: the house layer says where in the building a sector is, and the personal layer says which way a person should face. And they can disagree in the same home. A person of Kua 8 has the southwest as their Sheng Chi direction. In a Kan house the southwest sector reads as Jue Ming, the weakest of its eight. Eight Mansions contains no arithmetic that settles which layer wins, and pretending otherwise would be inventing a rule.
The two answers in one house
Take a home with the front door in the south wall. You walk in heading north, so your left hand points west and the far-left corner is the northwest corner of the building.
- Three-door: that northwest corner is the wealth area.
- Compass: a home facing south sits north, which makes it a Kan house, and a Kan house has its Sheng Chi sector in the southeast.
Those are opposite corners of the same building. Move the door to the north wall and the three-door answer follows it to the southeast corner while the compass answer moves to the east, because the house is now a Li house. There is no bearing and no door position at which the two methods reliably agree, and that is a structural fact about them rather than an error in either.
Why we will not promise this corner does anything
We are not going to tell you that a corner of your home affects your income. Sheng Chi translates as something like growing energy, and the theme our own tables attach to it is prosperity and momentum. That is a label a tradition puts on a place. It is not a forecast, there is no test attached to it, and the site’s terms say plainly that we make no claim about money, health or relationships.
What is worth your time is narrower and checkable. Work out which system your source is using — two things are called a bagua map sets out the tells — then stay inside it. If it is the compass one, take the bearing carefully, because sector edges at 22.5° and 67.5° mean a two-degree error moves the whole chart. See method and assumptions for where our tools stop.