Your eight characters (사주팔자), the Day Master, the Ten Gods on every pillar, and the ten-year Daeun cycles with the age each one starts.
Month boundaries from the Sun's true longitude · Korea's historical clock, including the +8:30 years · 34,000 cities offline
It is not asked for the pillars — those are the same for everyone born at that moment. It decides which way your Daeun runs. A man born in a yang-stem year and a woman born in a yin-stem year move forward through the sexagenary cycle; the other two combinations move backward. A brother and sister born the same year meet the same decades in opposite order, which is why their lives often peak at different ages.
The hour pillar changes every two hours, so a half-hour error in the offset can move it. Korea has changed its standard time more than once: UTC+08:30 from 1908 to 1912, back to +08:30 from 1954 until August 1961, with summer time in several of those years and again in 1987 and 1988. A calculator that assumes today's +09:00 for a 1957 birth at one in the morning can hand you the wrong branch. This page uses the offset in force in that city on that date and says so in the result.
Eight characters on their own are just a grid. The 십성 turn the grid into relationships: what supports you, what you produce, what you control, what controls you. Each of the ten has a Korean name and a conventional English one — 비견 Friend, 겁재 Rob Wealth, 식신 Eating God, 상관 Hurting Officer, 편재 and 정재 for wealth, 편관 and 정관 for authority, 편인 and 정인 for support. The names carry old flavour and are not verdicts; 편관, often translated Seven Killings, is a pressure star that some charts use very well.
Same four pillars, same sixty-unit cycle, same solar-term boundaries. If you want the chart with Chinese stem names, hidden-stem detail and the element balance laid out the Chinese way, use the BaZi calculator. If you want your birth year's animal and directions, the Kua number comes from the same solar year.
십성 (sipseong) are ten labels for how each character in your chart stands to your Day Master. Five relations — same element, what you produce, what you control, what controls you, what produces you — each split by matching or opposite polarity. Every character in the chart carries one, which is how a practitioner turns eight characters into a reading.
Because of rounding. The classical rule converts the distance from your birth to the neighbouring solar term at three days to the year. Some calculators drop a remainder of one day and round two days up, giving a whole number; others keep hours and minutes and give years and months. This page shows both, so you can match whichever your reader uses.
Yes. Korea kept UTC+08:30 from 1908 to 1912 and again from 1954 to August 1961, and ran summer time in several of those years and again in 1987–1988. This calculator takes the offset that was actually in force in that city on that date. A birth near a two-hour branch boundary can land on a different hour pillar because of it.
The four pillars are identical — the same sexagenary cycle, the same solar-term month boundaries. What differs is emphasis and vocabulary: Korean practice reads the chart through the Ten Gods and the Daeun cycle, and writes the stems and branches with hangul names.
No. A missing element is read as something you reach for rather than something you supply by default. Charts with all five present are not better; they are just differently arranged.