Chinese metaphysics
that actually gets
the chart right.

What BeyondBazi Offers

BeyondBazi calculates a Four Pillars chart from your birth details and then gives you the tools that build on it. Alongside the main calculator there is a compatibility reading between two charts, a side by side chart comparison, an annual forecast, an auspicious date finder, a Kua number and feng shui direction tool, a daily almanac, and a set of short quizzes. Charts can be saved for later. It is built for people who already have some interest in Chinese metaphysics and want the calculation done properly, rather than a generic reading assembled from a birth year and an animal sign alone.

What makes Bazi tractable as a tool is that the underlying calendar is a real astronomical system rather than a loose tradition. The twenty four solar terms that set the month boundaries are calculated from the sun's position along the ecliptic, and UNESCO lists the twenty four solar terms as intangible cultural heritage precisely because of that observational basis. The Chinese calendar is still maintained officially, and the Hong Kong Observatory publishes conversion tables for it. The interpretation layer is a tradition and should be read as one; the calendar underneath it is ordinary arithmetic that either checks out or does not.

Get your birth time as precisely as you can, because the hour pillar is a quarter of the chart and it changes every two hours. Check the birth certificate rather than working from memory. Where you were born matters too, since the recorded local time depends on the standard offset in force at the time, and offsets have changed: Singapore moved to UTC plus eight at the start of 1982, and the IANA time zone database documents these historical shifts. A chart built on an unconverted birth time will be confidently wrong in at least one pillar, and nothing later in the reading will flag it.

Why Use Free Tools Online

Browser based tools remove nearly everything that sits between a question and an answer. There is nothing to install, nothing to update, and no license to renew. For this subject the usual alternatives are a paid consultation, which is worth it for depth but not for checking one chart, or desktop software written for practitioners that assumes you already know the vocabulary. A web calculator sits between the two: you get the chart in a few seconds and can decide afterward whether you want to go further. It also opens on a phone, which is where most people look something up.

There is no account here, no email address, and no payment step. Your birth date, birth time, and birth location are genuinely personal details, and the combination is the sort of thing used to verify identity elsewhere. Nothing you enter is transmitted anywhere: the chart is calculated in your browser, and a chart you choose to save is written to your own device through the Web Storage API, which you can clear from browser settings at any time. Clearing that data removes the saved chart permanently, since there is no copy held anywhere else and nothing for us to restore it from.

How to Get Started

1. Find your birth time before you start rather than estimating it. The hour pillar shifts every two hours, so a guess within the wrong window changes a quarter of the chart and everything the reading draws from it.
2. Enter your birth city as well as the date and time. The calculator uses it for true solar time correction, which matters because clock time and solar time diverge depending on where you sit inside a time zone.
3. Read the Day Master section first. It is the reference point that the rest of the chart is interpreted against, and the element balance and Ten Gods analysis make far more sense once you have it.
4. Save your chart once it is correct, then use it with the other tools. Compatibility, the annual forecast, and the date finder all build on the same pillars rather than asking you to enter everything again.
5. Treat the reading as a lens rather than a forecast. The more useful question is whether a described pattern matches something you already recognize in yourself, not what the chart says will happen to you next year.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is BeyondBazi free to use?

Yes. The chart calculator, compatibility reading, annual forecast, date finder, feng shui directions, daily almanac, and quizzes are all free, with no account and no paid tier. The site is funded by advertising, which is why ad slots appear on some pages. Nothing is held back behind a signup, and no tool calculates your chart and then asks for payment to show it.

Do I need my exact birth time?

For a complete chart, yes. The hour pillar is one of the four and it changes every two hours, so an approximate time produces three correct pillars and one guess. If you genuinely cannot find your birth time, the year, month, and day pillars are still meaningful and the Day Master is still valid, but treat anything the reading says about the hour pillar as unreliable rather than approximate.

Is my birth data stored or sent anywhere?

No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser and nothing you enter is transmitted to a server. If you save a chart, it is written to your own device's browser storage and stays there. Clearing your browser data deletes it permanently, and it will not appear on another browser or device, because there is no account holding a copy.

Does Bazi predict the future?

We do not present it that way, and the site states plainly that it is for reflection rather than fate. Bazi is a traditional interpretive system with a long documented history, not a scientifically validated method of prediction. The calendar mathematics underneath it is exact and verifiable; what any particular pillar combination means about a person is interpretation. Read it as a structured prompt for thinking about yourself.

Why does my chart differ from another site's?

Usually the year boundary or the hour convention. Many calculators start the astrological year at January 1 or at Lunar New Year instead of Li Chun, approximate the solar term dates, or handle the late Zi hour differently. Those choices change real pillars rather than shading an interpretation. The accuracy section on this page sets out which conventions this calculator follows and why.

What Is the Chinese Daily Almanac (Tong Shu)

The Chinese daily almanac, known as the Tong Shu and also widely called the Huangli, is a day by day reference that has been consulted across Chinese communities for a very long time. For each date it sets out where that day sits in the lunisolar calendar, which stem and branch pair is attached to it, which solar term the season has reached, and which kinds of activity the tradition regards as suitable or better postponed. It is closer to a calendar with commentary than to a book of predictions, and in many households a copy simply lives in a drawer and is pulled out when a date needs choosing rather than being read cover to cover.

Calendars in imperial China were not a private matter. Determining the calendar was a function of the state, carried out by court astronomers whose observations of the sun, moon, and planets fed directly into the almanac that was then issued under official authority. That work sits inside a long and well documented history of astronomy and mathematics in East Asia, which is the subject of dedicated scholarship at institutions such as the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge. Reading the almanac with that history in mind makes it a good deal more interesting than the fortune telling framing it often receives in casual English language descriptions, and it explains why the calendrical portions are precise while the commentary is interpretive.

Today the Tong Shu remains a living practice rather than a historical curiosity, consulted in Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia, and across the wider diaspora when families settle on a wedding date, a moving day, or the opening of a business. Attitudes toward it vary enormously, from close observance to affectionate habit to polite scepticism, and all of those positions coexist comfortably within the same family. Teaching resources on East Asian history and culture, such as those published by Columbia University, are a good place to read about how practices like this one function socially rather than only doctrinally. What that scholarship shows is a practice woven into ordinary family decision making rather than governing it.

How to Read the Daily Almanac

1. Start with the date line and with the stem and branch pair shown for today. That pairing is the almanac's basic unit, repeating on a sixty day cycle, and it is what every other note about the day is organized around and derived from.
2. Check which solar term the current date falls within before reading anything else. Solar terms divide the year into twenty four distinct seasonal segments, and they carry the agricultural and seasonal associations that much of the surrounding commentary quietly assumes you already know and understand.
3. Read the suitable and unsuitable activity lists together rather than apart. They are two halves of one judgment, and a day described as good for beginnings and poor for endings is telling you something about emphasis and balance rather than issuing a verdict.
4. Notice that many listed activities are agricultural, ritual, or domestic in origin, reflecting the world the almanac grew up in. Translating one of those older categories into a modern equivalent is interpretation on your own part, and it is worth doing consciously rather than automatically.
5. Read the day as one input among several, alongside your actual schedule and the people who are involved. Traditional practice has generally worked this way as well, with the almanac consulted rather than strictly obeyed whenever real world constraints happened to pull in another direction.

Understanding Auspicious and Inauspicious Activities

The two lists most people look for are conventionally labelled yi, meaning suitable or advised, and ji, meaning better avoided. These are recommendations drawn from an elaborate system of correspondences between the day's stem and branch, the season, and a set of traditional day officers and star influences. It is worth being precise about what such a listing is and is not. It is a conventional judgment produced by a documented method, held in common by a community of practitioners, and it is not a measurement of anything and not a claim that harm follows from ignoring it. Different almanac editions sometimes disagree with one another on the same date, which is a normal feature of any interpretive tradition.

How much weight to give any of this is genuinely a personal decision, and cultural practice around it is far more relaxed than outside descriptions usually suggest. Many people who check a date for a wedding would not think of consulting the almanac before an ordinary working day, and that selective use is traditional rather than inconsistent. University resources on Chinese civilization, including those maintained by the University of Washington, situate customs like this within wider social life rather than treating them as isolated superstition. Nothing here forecasts outcomes, and no listing on this page should be the reason you decide a matter of health, money, or personal safety one way or the other.