Kua Number 4: What It Means and How to Use Your Four Good Directions

Kua number 4 tells you which of eight compass directions work in your favour and which ones don't, based on your birth year and gender. It's the number a feng shui consultant runs before they ever pull out a compass in your house — everything after that, the desk position, the bed, the stove, follows from this one figure. If you're a 4, you belong to the East group, and that single fact settles most of the argument before it starts.

What your trigram says

Number 4 sits on the trigram Xun (巽), element Wood. Xun's image is wind through a gap. Not a storm, not a gale — wind finding the space under a door and working through it steadily. That's the character consultants attach to a 4: not forceful, but persistent. It shows up in people who wear an opponent down rather than overpower them, who keep at a problem quietly until it gives.

Your seated direction — the one your own trigram points to — is Southeast. That's your Fu Wei, and it matters more for daily comfort than for ambition. More on that below.

Your four good directions

There are four directions that work for you, each carrying a different job. Don't treat them as interchangeable — a consultant who tells you "just face any of your four" hasn't done the reading properly.

Sheng Qi (生氣) — North. This is the direction for drive: career momentum, income, the push behind decisions. If you run a business or you're angling for a role, this is the direction your desk should face when you're doing the work that actually moves the needle, not the direction you sit in for admin.

Tian Yi (天醫) — South. The health direction — recovery, and, just as often, the people who show up when you're down and actually help. Older Cantonese-speaking consultants will tell you to face this direction when you're unwell or negotiating anything medical. In my experience it's also useful for the seat facing whoever handles your money — accountants, doctors, anyone whose competence you're relying on.

Yan Nian (延年) — East. Relationships and steady partnership — marriage, family, long friendships that don't need managing. This is the direction dining tables get oriented toward in households that take the system seriously, on the logic that a family eating facing each other's Yan Nian keeps arguments from festering.

Fu Wei (伏位) — Southeast. Your own seated direction. Used for clarity and study — the direction to face when you need to concentrate rather than push. It's the quietest of your four, and also the one most consultants underrate, because it doesn't promise anything dramatic. It's just where you keep your footing.

Your four difficult ones

Four directions work against you. None of them are a sentence — they're a nudge in the wrong direction, not a wall.

Huo Hai (禍害) — Northwest. The mildest of the four: small mishaps, friction, things running late. If your home office happens to face Northwest, it does not mean your career stalls — it means paperwork takes an extra round trip more often than it should. Annoying, not disqualifying.

Wu Gui (五鬼) — Southwest. Gossip, petty theft, arguments that seem to come from nowhere. Facing this direction at your desk for eight hours a day is worth fixing if you can; facing it for the twenty minutes you eat lunch is not going to unravel your office politics on its own.

Liu Sha (六煞) — West. Legal trouble and disputes that drag rather than resolve. This is the one people get anxious about when they discover their bedroom door opens onto it. It does not mean a lawsuit is coming. It means, if you're already in a dispute, this isn't the direction to sit while you negotiate it.

Jue Ming (絕命) — Northeast. The heaviest of the four in classical readings, traditionally linked to loss. Modern consultants in KL and Singapore tend to downplay it compared to how older texts treat it — in my experience it's worth respecting for a main door or a stove, and not worth losing sleep over for a guest bathroom. Where you place real weight on a direction should scale with how much time you spend facing it.

If you're not a 4, you may belong to the West group instead — numbers 2, 6, 7 and 8 sit there, and their four good directions are the mirror of yours: our bad directions are their good ones, almost point for point. That's why a couple with kua numbers from different groups sometimes can't agree on which way the bed should go, and why some consultants just pick whichever partner has the stronger claim on the room.

A worked example

Here's a chart actually calculated, so you can see the arithmetic rather than take it on faith. Birth: Penang, 23 August 1996, male.

For a man, you take the birth year, add the two digits together, and keep reducing until you have one digit: 9 + 6 = 15, then 1 + 5 = 6. That 6 is the intermediate factor. The male formula then subtracts it from 10: 10 − 6 = 4. That's the kua number — 4, same as the worked example above, so everything in this article applies to that chart directly: East group, trigram Xun, Sheng Qi in the North, Jue Ming in the Northeast.

One caution that applies to every chart, not just this one: the kua number turns over at Li Chun, the solar term around 4 February, not on 1 January. A birthday in late January or the first days of February belongs to the previous kua year, not the calendar one. This particular birth date, 23 August, falls well clear of that boundary, so no adjustment was needed here — but it's the first thing to check before you trust any calculation, including your own.

Roughly one person in nine comes out as a 4. If this is your number, you're not reading something unusual — you're reading the same eight-direction chart that a fair slice of your street is also carrying around.

Using it in a real room

Direction means where you face while you work or eat, and — this is disputed — where the top of your head points while you sleep. Some practitioners insist the head direction is what counts for the bed; others say only the door and the sightline from the bed matter, and the head direction is secondary. I lean toward the head-direction camp, but I won't pretend the other school is wrong; say plainly to your own consultant which one they're using, because it changes the answer.

In practice: desk facing North when you're doing revenue-generating work, South-facing seat when negotiating anything medical or financial, dining table oriented East if the household will sit for it, stove ideally not facing Northeast if you can help it — the stove is the one appliance most schools agree carries real weight, because it's tied to the household's health and finances both. If your best direction happens to be a wall, don't knock it down. Shift the desk at an angle, or accept the next-best of your four; a doorway or a fixed pipe run wins over a compass sector every time.

A kua number is one layer of the reading, not the whole of it. The shape and age of the building itself carries its own weight in feng shui, and your BaZi chart — the birth-hour pillars — covers ground a compass number never will. Treat this as a starting layout, not a verdict on the year.

How to check your own number

To check where a compass reading you already have lines up: a phone compass shows magnetic north, and a feng shui compass ring is read against that same north — face the door or the desk, note the bearing, then match it to the sectors above. If you'd rather have the whole chart run for your own birth date, the calculator at spacemirror.ru/en/kua.html takes a date and gender and returns the number, the trigram and all eight directions with their sectors, the same way this one was run.