Which direction should the head of your bed face?
Published 2026-08-19
There is no single good direction to sleep facing. In Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai), the school this site runs, the answer comes from the year you were born: it sorts the eight compass directions into four that suit you and four that do not, and the four you get depend on your own number. A direction that is strongest for one person is among the worst for the person next to them.
So the honest answer is in two parts. First, which four directions are yours. Second, whether the room you actually have can point a bed at any of them — which is where most advice stops and where the real problem usually is.
Your four directions
Your Kua number comes from your birth year and sex, with the year counted from the beginning of spring rather than 1 January. Each number carries four favourable directions, named after the star Eight Mansions assigns to them.
| Kua | Group | Sheng Chi | Tian Yi | Yan Nian | Fu Wei |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (Kan) | East | Southeast | East | South | North |
| 2 (Kun) | West | Northeast | West | Northwest | Southwest |
| 3 (Zhen) | East | South | North | Southeast | East |
| 4 (Xun) | East | North | South | East | Southeast |
| 6 (Qian) | West | West | Northeast | Southwest | Northwest |
| 7 (Dui) | West | Northwest | Southwest | Northeast | West |
| 8 (Gen) | West | Southwest | Northwest | West | Northeast |
| 9 (Li) | East | East | Southeast | North | South |
Sheng Chi (生氣) is the one usually described as strongest. Fu Wei (伏位) is your own trigram’s direction and is treated as the settled, quiet one — often the recommendation for a bedroom specifically, since a bedroom is where you are least active.
There is no Kua 5. The arithmetic can produce it, and standard practice substitutes 2 for men and 8 for women. Some teachers handle that differently.
The Kua number calculator works out yours and lists all eight directions.
Which way does “facing” mean
For a bed, the direction is where the top of your head points when you are lying down — which in practice is the wall the headboard is against. It is not the direction you look when sitting up in bed, and it is not the direction the room faces. Get this backwards and every answer inverts.
The part most advice skips
A bed with its headboard flat against a wall can only point at four directions: the ones those four walls face. If your room sits square to the compass, that is North, East, South and West, and the four diagonals are simply unreachable.
That lands very unevenly:
- East group (Kua 1, 3, 4, 9) has North, South, East and Southeast as its four. Three of those are cardinal, so a square room reaches three of four.
- West group (Kua 2, 6, 7, 8) has Southwest, West, Northwest and Northeast. Only West is cardinal, so a square room reaches exactly one.
If you are West group, in a square room, and the west wall has the window or the door in it, there is no bed position that satisfies both the direction and a solid wall behind your head. No tool can conjure one. What practitioners do at that point is angle the bed away from the wall, which trades the solid headboard for the direction — a real trade, and not one with an obvious winner.
The bedroom layout generator says which of your four are out of reach for the room you enter, rather than quietly promoting whatever is left into first place.
Direction is not the only rule
Eight Mansions sources agree on a short list of bedroom placement rules, and direction is one item on it. The others are about the room:
- A solid wall behind the headboard — not a window, not a doorway.
- Not lying in line with the door, so that someone entering walks straight at the foot of the bed. This is the one nearly every source objects to.
- The door visible from the bed without the bed being in its path.
- No bathroom directly behind the headboard, and no beam crossing over it.
- Walking room on both sides.
Small rooms cannot satisfy all of them at once. When that happens the useful thing is to know which rule you are giving up, which is why the generator lists the findings for a position instead of handing back a score.
Two people, one bed
If you share the room and one of you is East group while the other is West, no head direction suits you both — their four are your four bad ones and vice versa. There is no arithmetic inside Eight Mansions that resolves it, and a tool that averages the two is inventing something. Run it twice and decide between yourselves whose direction the bed follows.
What this does not tell you
Eight Mansions names a direction Sheng Chi or Jue Ming. It does not predict what happens to you, and neither do we — see method and assumptions for what we compute and where we stop. If your bed is currently pointing at one of your four unfavourable directions and you sleep perfectly well, that is not a contradiction to resolve; the tradition describes placement, not outcomes.
One practical note that has nothing to do with tradition: your birth year is counted from the beginning of spring, and that is an astronomical moment, not a fixed date. It falls on 3, 4 or 5 February depending on the year. If you were born in the first days of February, a calculator that assumes 4 February may give you the wrong number, and therefore the wrong four directions.