About EightFates

Chinese astrology, explained clearly

EightFates helps curious beginners explore Chinese astrology without needing to start with specialist vocabulary. Our English and Chinese guides connect the familiar twelve animals with the more detailed structure of BaZi, or Four Pillars. You can begin with a year sign, compare traditional relationship themes, read a seasonal guide, or use the free calculator to examine your own chart. The aim is to make the system understandable while keeping its limits visible.

A zodiac animal describes one part of a calendar cycle. It does not contain a whole person. Our articles treat animal and element descriptions as cultural images that can prompt questions, rather than labels that establish someone's character. A compatibility score is likewise a shorthand for a traditional branch relationship, not a measured probability that two people will get along.

What the calculator does

The BaZi calculator turns a birth date, time, and place into year, month, day, and, when known, hour pillars. Each pillar pairs a Heavenly Stem with an Earthly Branch. It also presents the Day Master, five-element information, and the traditional luck-pillar sequence. Historical time zones, daylight-saving changes, and optional true solar time correction are part of the calculation. When the birth time is unknown or a boundary admits multiple possibilities, the result preserves that uncertainty.

Our engine adapts the MIT-licensed bazi-skill project and retains its attribution. Calculation checks include an E1 golden set of 60 charts compared across six sources in continuous integration, and an E2 suite of 263 requests tested for invariants. These checks help catch calendar and implementation errors. They do not establish that astrological interpretations predict real-world events, and they do not replace independent review of an unusual historical birth record.

Calendar dates and evidence

The popular Chinese zodiac year changes at Lunar New Year. The BaZi year pillar changes at Lìchūn, also called Spring Commences. Because these are different boundaries, a January or February birthday may have different year labels under the two conventions. Our guides explain which convention they use instead of silently treating the dates as interchangeable.

The published Lunar New Year table is checked against both Hong Kong Observatory conversion tables and the calculation engine. The repository's evidence files record the source URLs, source-file hashes, and comparison results. This makes the calendar work reproducible and allows a correction to be traced to its evidence. The 2027 guide also distinguishes its Lunar New Year date from the exact Lìchūn boundary.

Privacy and responsible use

The homepage zodiac lookup runs in your browser. The full BaZi calculator sends birth details to our chart service to calculate a result; the page does not save those details or results. Custom analytics exclude birth inputs and derived chart values. Hosting and security systems may process basic request metadata. The Privacy Policy explains those distinctions and the separate rules for accounts and report services.

EightFates is for cultural learning, reflection, and entertainment. Our guides do not promise outcomes or provide medical, legal, financial, mental-health, or relationship-safety advice. For questions about the site, privacy, or a possible calculation error, contact privacy@eightfates.com. Describe the page and issue first; please do not send birth details unless they are needed to investigate your request.