Kua Number 7: What It Means and How to Use It

Kua number 7 is a personal compass reading. Work it out from your birth year and gender, and you get eight directions - four that work in your favour and four that don't - each mapped to a Chinese trigram sitting on your birth chart. Consultants use it to place a desk, turn a bed, or check whether a front door was ever going to help the household. It doesn't replace anything else in the house. It's one number, and this article explains what it actually does.

What your trigram says

Kua 7 sits on the trigram Dui (兌), Lake, and its element is Metal. The plain image consultants use is an open pool of water - it talks, it trades, it pleases. That's not decoration; it's the character the trigram carries into a reading. People with kua 7 sit facing West in their own trigram position, and that West seat is one of their four good directions in its own right, which I'll get to.

Kua 7 belongs to what's called the West group, along with kua 2, 6 and 8. The other family - kua 1, 3, 4 and 9 - is the East group, and their four good directions are the mirror opposite of yours. If you married into a household or share a flat with someone from the East group, don't expect your lucky corner to be theirs. That single fact solves more arguments over furniture placement than anything else in this system.

Your four good directions

These are the four directions a kua 7 chart favours, each tied to a specific star. Facing them while you work or eat, in the classical reading, is what counts - more on the bed in a moment.

Sheng Qi (生氣) - Northwest. This is your best direction, the one consultants call the "big money" star, though I'd rather say it plainly: it's associated with career momentum and income drive. If your desk can face Northwest, that's the placement to fight for.

Tian Yi (天醫) - Southwest. The health star. It's used for recovery, for the people around you who actually help when things go wrong, and it's often the direction a sickbed gets turned toward, if the room allows it.

Yan Nian (延年) - Northeast. This governs relationships - not romance specifically, but steady partnership: marriage, family, business partners you intend to keep. A dining table facing Northeast is a common request from couples who want fewer flare-ups at dinner.

Fu Wei (伏位) - West. Your own seat. It's the mildest of the four good directions - used for clarity, study, and just keeping your footing during an ordinary week. Students and anyone studying for an exam are usually pointed here first, because it's steady rather than dramatic.

Your four difficult ones

Four directions work against a kua 7 chart. None of them are a sentence. They describe a lean, not a verdict, and every one of them can be sat in occasionally without consequence - what matters is where you park your desk and your bed for years at a time, not where you happen to stand at a party.

Huo Hai (禍害) - North. The mildest of the four. It's associated with small mishaps, friction, delay - the kind of week where three minor things go wrong and none of them matter individually. It does not mean anything serious follows from a North-facing kitchen.

Wu Gui (五鬼) - South. Linked to gossip, theft, arguments that seem to come from nowhere. A South-facing sofa in the living room is not a crisis; it just isn't the seat you'd choose for the head of the household if a better option exists in the room.

Liu Sha (六煞) - Southeast. Tied to legal trouble and drawn-out disputes. Consultants sometimes overstate this one. In my experience it shows up more as delay and paperwork than as anything you'd call a disaster, and a Southeast-facing spare room is nothing to lose sleep over.

Jue Ming (絕命) - East. The heaviest of the four, associated with the largest loss in the system. Even here, the reading is about a long-term posture, not a single unlucky day. A desk that happens to face East once a week during a meeting is not the same as a desk that faces East for eight hours daily over years - direction matters most when it's sustained, and a family with an East-facing front door has other layers of protection long before this becomes something to build a whole renovation around.

Kua 7 turns up in roughly one person in nine, so if you've just read your own set of directions here, you're sharing the trigram with a fair slice of any room you're standing in.

A worked example

Here's a chart I calculated for a client born in Johor Bahru, 29 May 1993, male. I'm using it because it lands cleanly on kua 7 and shows the arithmetic without complication.

For a birth date in late May, there's no Li Chun question to sort out - the cut is around 4 February, and this birthday sits well clear of it, so the calendar year and the kua year are the same: 1993. That's worth flagging here because it's the first thing I check on every chart. A birthday in January or the first days of February belongs to the previous kua year, not the calendar one, and skipping that check is the single most common error I see in self-calculated charts.

The male formula runs off the last two digits of the birth year. Take 93: 9 + 3 = 12, then 1 + 2 = 3. That's the reduced factor. For a man, you subtract that factor from 10: 10 - 3 = 7. No further remapping was needed here - remapping only comes into play when that subtraction produces a 5, which isn't the case for this birth year. The result is kua 7, and every direction in this article is that chart's direction set.

Using it in a real room

Direction, in this system, means two different things depending on the activity. At a desk or dining table, it's where you face while seated. In bed, it's where the top of your head points while you sleep - and here practitioners genuinely disagree. Some insist the head direction is what counts; others weight the direction the room itself sits in more heavily than the bed's orientation inside it. I'm not going to pretend there's a settled answer; I tell clients both readings exist and let them choose which one they trust enough to act on.

Most rooms don't hand you a free choice of every direction, and that's normal. If your best direction, Northwest, happens to be a wall you can't move your desk against, the usual fallback is to rank your remaining three good directions and take the best one the furniture layout actually allows. A stove is the one fixture where the rule flips - traditionally you want the direction facing away from you at the stove to sit in your good set, since you work with your back partly toward the burner rather than seated facing it. A front door is fixed by the building, not by you, so the working question there is usually about placement inside the entrance rather than moving the door itself.

None of this happens in isolation. The building's own facing and construction period carry their own reading, and a full BaZi chart adds a layer about timing that a kua number was never built to cover. Treat this number as one input among several, not the whole picture.

How to check your own number

If you want your own set of eight directions run rather than taking someone else's word for it, the calculator at spacemirror.ru/en/kua.html takes a birth date and gender and returns the number, the trigram, and all eight directions with their compass sectors. For reading a room against those sectors, a phone compass gives you magnetic north, and a feng shui compass ring is read against that same magnetic bearing for this system - stand still, let the needle settle, and read the direction you're actually facing before you decide anything about the furniture.