Kua number calculator
In Vietnamese feng shui, your birth year and gender give you a cung phi, one of the eight trigrams of the Eight Mansions (Bát Trạch) system, better known in English as your Kua number. It sorts you into the East or West group and marks four compass directions as favourable and four as unfavourable for you. Vietnamese families use it to decide which way a door, a bed or a desk should face.
How this is calculated
- The digits of your birth year are added until one digit is left (1985 → 1+9+8+5 = 23 → 2+3 = 5). Men and women read that number from two different rows of the traditional Eight Mansions table, which gives one of eight trigrams and its Kua number.
- Each trigram belongs to the East group (Kan, Li, Zhen, Xun) or the West group (Qian, Kun, Gen, Dui), and assigns each of the eight compass directions one of eight "stars": four favourable, four unfavourable.
- Colours and lucky numbers follow the element of your trigram, through the five-element cycle (Wood feeds Fire, Fire feeds Earth, Earth feeds Metal, Metal feeds Water, Water feeds Wood).
- The nạp âm element is a separate reading of the birth year's stem and branch (can chi) in the 60-year cycle.
These results are a cultural reference from Vietnamese tradition. They are not a substitute for advice from an engineer or architect on how a home is built or laid out.