Feng shui bagua map, laid out by compass direction
This is the compass bagua — the eight trigrams fixed to real compass directions, with the map turning according to which way your home sits. If you were looking for the nine-square grid that lines up with your front door, that is the three-door bagua map, and it is a different tool.
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The eight sectors
| Sector | House says | Your chart says | Best used for |
|---|
"House says" comes from the sitting direction. "Your chart says" comes from your birth year. Where the two disagree there is no arithmetic that settles it — see method.
Two things are called a bagua map
Search for a bagua map and you will find two layouts that disagree with each other. Both are in wide use and neither is a fake:
| Compass bagua | Three-door bagua | |
|---|---|---|
| Aligned to | Real compass directions | The wall your front door is in |
| You need | A compass bearing for the building | A floor plan and the door position |
| The map | Rotates with the building | Always the same way round |
| Sector names | The eight trigrams and their stars | Life areas — wealth, fame, relationships, career |
| Also called | Classical, traditional, Eight Mansions | BTB, Black Sect, Western feng shui |
They land in different places. Under the three-door map the far-left corner from your front door is the wealth area in every home ever built. Under the compass map that same corner is whatever direction it actually faces, which changes house to house. If you have read that your southeast corner is your wealth corner, that is the compass tradition; if you have read that it is the back-left corner as you walk in, that is the three-door one.
This tool is the compass one. We build the three-door one as well and we are not going to tell you either is wrong. But mixing them produces a map that belongs to neither, so pick a lane before you start moving furniture.
Direction and location are two different questions
This trips up nearly every free calculator. Eight Mansions answers two questions with two different charts:
- Which way should I face? — your head in bed, your seat at a desk. This uses your birth year. That is the Kua number calculator.
- Where in the house should this room be? — which corner gets the bedroom, which gets the bathroom. This uses the house's sitting direction, and it is what this page computes.
A tool that answers the second question with your birth year is mixing the two up. So is one that tells you which corner of the house is your "wealth corner" from your birthday alone.
Taking the bearing
Facing is the direction the front of the building looks out on — usually the side with the main entrance, or the side with the main view if those differ. Sitting is the opposite 180°, and the house is named after the sitting side. A house facing south sits north, and Eight Mansions calls it a Kan house.
Sectors are 45° wide, so their edges fall at 22.5°, 67.5°, and so on. A reading two degrees off can move you into the neighboring sector and change every row in the table. Take the bearing outside, away from the building's steel, and take it more than once. If the tool warns you that you are near an edge, that warning is the most useful output on the page.
Why a bathroom wants a weak sector
The rules below run in both directions. Rooms you occupy for hours — bedroom, study, the main door's approach — want the four favored sectors. Rooms nobody lingers in are better placed in the four weak ones, on the reasoning that a good sector spent on a bathroom is a good sector wasted.
| Room | Wants | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Master bedroom | A favored sector | You spend the most unbroken hours here, so sources agree it belongs in a sector the house treats well. |
| Main door | A favored sector | The main door is where the house takes in traffic, and it is the one position you cannot move later. |
| Study or desk | A favored sector | Sustained concentration is treated the same way as sleep: put it in a good sector, then face a good direction while you are in it. |
| Living room | A favored sector | Shared daily use, so a good sector helps — though it matters less than the bedroom or the door. |
| Bathroom | A weak sector | A bathroom in one of the four good sectors is widely described as wasting that sector, so the weak sectors are where you want it. |
| Storage or utility | A weak sector | Rooms nobody lingers in are the natural occupants of the sectors you would rather not sit in. |
The kitchen: we are not going to pick a side
One line of practice puts the stove in a weak sector deliberately, on the reasoning that fire burns off what is there.
Another line treats the kitchen as a room you use every day and wants it in a good sector like any other. The two positions reach opposite answers and neither is a minority view.
Both sides agree on a separate point: the stove mouth — the side the ignition or gas inlet faces — should face one of the occupant's four good directions. That rule uses your birth chart, not the house.
This is why the kitchen is listed separately in the table above rather than filed under "best used for". Handing you a confident answer where practice is genuinely split would be the easy thing and the wrong one.
When you and the house are in different groups
Houses fall into the same East and West groups as people. If yours is the other group from you, every sector the house favours is one your own chart does not, and the table will show eight straight disagreements. That is a real situation, not a bug, and it does not have a resolution inside Eight Mansions — you would be choosing which layer to follow. Most practitioners weight the house for where rooms go and your own chart for which way you face, since you can move furniture and cannot move walls.