Tai Sui directions
Every year the almanac marks out a few compass arcs and asks that they stay undisturbed — not that you avoid living there, but that you avoid digging, knocking through or renovating in them. This gives those arcs for any year, at their real width of 15 degrees each, and checks a bearing against them.
How to use this tool
- What you need
- A year. A compass bearing too, if you want to check one particular direction.
- How to use it
-
- Enter a year from 1900 to 2100.
- Read the arcs, each with its degree range and the mountain it sits on.
- Optionally enter a bearing to see whether it falls inside one of them.
- Use this when
Why 15 degrees and not 45
Most pages give these positions as a palace — "the south is afflicted this year" — and a palace is 45 degrees wide. The tradition places them on the 24 mountains, which are 15 degrees each, so a palace-level answer is three times wider than the arc it came from. Two thirds of the palace it names is not actually marked.
That difference decides real cases. A wall on a bearing of 190 degrees and a wall on 200 are both "south" at palace resolution, and only one of them can be inside a 15-degree arc. This is why the bearing check above takes a number rather than a compass point.
This layer is not Eight Mansions
The placement work on this site runs Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai) — the Kua directions, the house chart, the room-by-room readings. These annual arcs are not part of it. They come from the stem-branch calendar, appear in almanacs that take no position on which school you follow, and are used alongside whichever one you use.
So a direction has two independent answers, and they do not resolve into one. A bearing can be favorable for you in Eight Mansions and marked by the almanac in the same year. Neither overrides the other, and anyone presenting a single verdict has quietly picked a side. The 2027 case is worked through in Tai Sui 2027, where not to renovate.
When the year turns, for this purpose
These arcs follow the stem-branch year, which turns at the beginning of spring, not at Chinese New Year and not on 1 January. In the days between those boundaries the arcs have already moved while the animal has not. The Chinese calendar tool shows both boundary dates for any year, and the reason they differ is in when does the Chinese year actually start.
What the tradition actually asks
It asks that the ground and the structure in these arcs stay still for the year. Sleeping in the sector, sitting in it, walking through it — the almanac takes no position on any of that. What it names is construction: excavation, demolition, cutting a new opening. If you have no work planned, there is nothing here to act on.
The site makes no claim about what happens if the work goes ahead anyway. The tradition records the arcs and the advice; it does not supply a mechanism, and neither do we.