The Kua number, derived from date of birth and gender, determines your favorable and unfavorable compass directions and zones within a space. Guidelines are provided for optimal organization of home or workspace: favorable directions for sleeping, working, eating; zones for attracting prosperity, love and health; colors and elements that amplify your energy. Advice for correcting unfavorable zones is also included.
Where it comes from
Feng shui — the words mean wind and water — is a Chinese practice of siting buildings and graves, documented from the Han dynasty and with archaeological hints of alignment practices millennia older. It was originally concerned with landscape: which slope, which water, which orientation. The compass school developed from the Han dynasty onward using the luopan, a compass ring carrying the trigrams, the twenty-four directions and the constellations. The simplified Western version, which maps a fixed grid onto a floor plan regardless of orientation, was introduced in the 1980s and is not the traditional method.
How the method works
Traditional practice starts from the facing direction of the building and the year it was built, from which a flying star chart is drawn — a grid of numbers distributed through nine sectors. Each combination of numbers is read for what that sector supports and what it aggravates, and the chart changes annually as the stars move. The five elements — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — are used to adjust: an unfavourable combination is weakened by introducing the element that controls it. Furniture position, door and bed orientation and what sits in each sector all follow from the chart.
What a reading covers
A reading gives the sectors of your space with what each currently carries, which ones to activate and which to leave quiet, the element adjustments for the difficult ones, and the placements that matter most — bed, desk, stove and main door.
Common questions
- Do I need to know which way my flat faces?
- For traditional practice, yes — the facing direction is the starting point and everything else follows from it. The grid-based Western version skips this, which is why the two give different answers.
- Does it require buying objects?
- No. Most traditional adjustments are about position, orientation and what you remove. The commercial side, with fountains and figurines, is a later addition.
- Why does the advice change each year?
- Because the annual stars move through the sectors. A sector favourable this year can be the one to leave undisturbed next year, and traditional practice updates accordingly.