The Si Hua Table You Found Online Might Not Be the One Your Reader Uses

Someone sent me two chart screenshots last week.

Same birth data, same system, Zi Wei Dou Shu both times. One chart marked Tian Tong with Hua Ke. The other marked Tai Yin with Hua Ke. He asked me which one was wrong.

Neither, I said.

He went quiet for a while.

I have had this conversation more times than I can count. The four transformations, Si Hua, are the part of Zi Wei Dou Shu that produces the sharpest conclusions and starts the loudest arguments. The rule sounds almost insultingly simple. Whatever heavenly stem governs your birth year, four stars get tagged with Lu, Quan, Ke and Ji. Ten stems, ten fixed rows, one row per year, rigid as a duty roster.

The trouble is the roster itself.

There is more than one.

Here is the full table used by the San He lineage, the one carried by the common edition of the Zi Wei Dou Shu Quan Shu. Every chart and every reading on FateStar is locked to this table. No switching, no blending.

Year stem	Hua Lu	Hua Quan	Hua Ke	Hua Ji
Jia	Lian Zhen	Po Jun	Wu Qu	Tai Yang
Yi	Tian Ji	Tian Liang	Zi Wei	Tai Yin
Bing	Tian Tong	Tian Ji	Wen Chang	Lian Zhen
Ding	Tai Yin	Tian Tong	Tian Ji	Ju Men
Wu	Tan Lang	Tai Yin	You Bi	Tian Ji
Ji	Wu Qu	Tan Lang	Tian Liang	Wen Qu
Geng	Tai Yang	Wu Qu	Tian Tong	Tai Yin
Xin	Ju Men	Tai Yang	Wen Qu	Wen Chang
Ren	Tian Liang	Zi Wei	Zuo Fu	Wu Qu
Gui	Po Jun	Ju Men	Tai Yin	Tan Lang

Before you read off a row, make sure you have the right stem.

This step trips people up more than the table does. Zi Wei Dou Shu runs on the Chinese lunar calendar, so the year stem follows the lunar year. January the first on a Gregorian calendar means nothing here. Worse, BaZi rolls over to the next year at Start of Spring, while Zi Wei rolls over at lunar New Year. Those two boundaries fall on different days. Anyone born in late January or early February can sit in one year for BaZi and the previous year for Zi Wei. Both systems are internally consistent. You just cannot mix the boundaries.

Get the stem wrong and the entire row moves. All four markers, all at once.

Now to the disagreements.

Take the table above to another reader and roughly three cells will not match.

The famous one is Geng. My table says Tian Tong takes Hua Ke and Tai Yin takes Hua Ji. Another lineage swaps exactly those two, so Tai Yin takes Ke and Tian Tong takes Ji. That is where my friend's two screenshots came from. Under one reading the benefic star carries a good name. Under the other, the same star carries a debt. The conclusions land nowhere near each other.

The second cell is Hua Ke under Ren. Some editions give Zuo Fu, others give Tian Fu. One is a support star, the other a major star. That changes how much weight the marker carries when you read the chart.

The third is Hua Ke under Wu, where You Bi and Tai Yang both have their defenders.

The reflex I would most warn against here is rushing to declare one side fake.

Transmitted Zi Wei Dou Shu is not one book. It is two systems. One line runs through the Quan Shu, the other through the Quan Ji, and both travelled down through Ming and Qing woodblock prints and hand copies. Character order drifting between print runs was ordinary for manuscript transmission, not some scandal. The San He and Fei Xing schools each inherited one branch, each accumulated centuries of case work, and each can show you evidence that holds up on its own terms.

There is a line in the Tai Wei Fu, the opening rhapsody of the Quan Shu, that I keep coming back to. Stars share the same path, but the reckoning divides into fixed configurations. It was written about star placement, but it describes the Si Hua schism just as well. Same star, same palace, different reckoning rule, two different readings.

It reminds me of version numbers in software.

One open source project forks into two branches. Each iterates for three hundred years. Each has users who swear by it. Then you walk up and ask which branch is the real one. The moment that question leaves your mouth, you have already asked the wrong thing. What matters is not which fork is correct. It is knowing which fork you are running, and being certain you did not splice the two together.

Splicing is the actual danger.

The worst case I have seen was not someone using the wrong table. It was someone charting with the Quan Shu table, interpreting with Fei Xing self transformation logic, then bolting on a verdict from a random video. Three sources, three sets of underlying assumptions, stitched onto one chart. A chart like that can be made to explain anything, which is another way of saying it can no longer be wrong.

So here is what I think you can actually do with this.

First, next time you sit down with a reader, open with a question. Which Si Hua table do you use, and under Geng, does Hua Ji go to Tai Yin or Tian Tong. It is a mild question, not a challenge, and it tells you a great deal. Someone who has genuinely done the work will tell you which branch they follow, why, and where that branch is weak. Someone who cannot answer, or who insists there are no schools and Si Hua is just Si Hua, has handed you a red flag.

Second, if you chart for yourself, lock one table and leave it alone. Not because that table is superior, but because you need a stable coordinate system. Swap the system every week and you can never tell whether the chart was wrong or the reading was. That was the first rule I set when building the tool. Every table carries its source, and there is no convenient switch to flip.

Third, and this is the one I care about most, where the marker lands matters far more than which star carries it.

Hua Ji in your health palace and Hua Ji in your career palace are different situations. Even with Geng under dispute, you can run both tables and see which palace each version points to. Very often the two palaces turn out to describe the same thing from opposite sides. One says you ignore physical warning signs, the other says you push through at work past the point of sense. What you might actually change sits in that landing spot, not in the name of the star.

Back to those two screenshots.

What I told him was, stop asking which one is right. Run both. See which palace the Hua Ji lands in under each table. Then look back over the past five years and ask which of those two areas gave you more trouble.

He came back later and said both of them did.

That sounds like a non answer, but I think it is closer to what this system actually is than any victory lap either school could take. A birth chart was never a verdict. It is a terrain map. Two survey teams using different contour standards will hand you slightly different drawings. The mountain does not move.

Believe it or not as you like. Just do not stand over two contradictory maps arguing about which way to walk.

Common questions

How do I find my year stem?

Look up the sexagenary stem for your lunar birth year. Do not use January the first, and do not borrow the Start of Spring boundary from BaZi. If you were born before lunar New Year, your stem is still the previous year's. Any charting tool that handles the lunar calendar and leap months properly will do this for you, and doing it in your head around the turn of the year is where mistakes happen.

Has either version of the table been proven wrong?

No. Both branches carry centuries of transmission and case work, and there is no surviving original manuscript decisive enough to settle it. The honest position is to state your table and its source rather than announce a winner. Anyone telling you the other school is fake is worth a follow up question or two.

Are stems other than Geng, Ren and Wu disputed?

The mainstream disagreements concentrate on those three, Geng most of all. The other seven stems agree across both major systems. A few fringe manuscripts differ, but they never circulated widely.

If I switch tables, do I have to rebuild the whole chart?

No. Si Hua only changes which four stars carry markers. It does not touch star placement. Life palace, body palace, the twelve palaces and every major star stay exactly where they were. What shifts is the emphasis of the reading, not the map.

About the author, and a note

I am Louis. I build FateStar, and I have worked through more than three hundred charts. The table in this article is locked to the San He reading of the common Zi Wei Dou Shu Quan Shu edition, and the sources are named in the text.

Zi Wei Dou Shu is a structural model from Chinese tradition, useful for observing tendencies and timing. It does not replace the judgement of a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant, and nothing here is a basis for medical, legal or financial decisions.

References Zi Wei Dou Shu Quan Shu, common edition attributed to Luo Hongxian, Ming dynasty Zi Wei Dou Shu Quan Ji, the Shi Ba Fei Xing Ce Tian system Yuan Hai Zi Ping, on the calendrical basis for deriving the year stem