Calculate luck pillars - BaZi Da Yun ten-year cycle API
post_chinese_astrology_bazi_luck_pillarsRead-only
Calculate the da yun luck pillars, the ten-year periods a BaZi chart walks through after birth. Returns the direction the sequence runs, the age it begins at with the day count behind that age, each ten-year pillar with the Ten God relation its stem holds to the natal Day Master, and an optional year-by-year annual overlay. Direction follows the classical rule: a male born in a yang-stem year and a female born in a yin-stem year run forward through the sexagenary cycle, the other two combinations run backward. Built for astrology apps, life-timing features, and agents that need a reproducible forecast spine.
Input Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| date | Yes | Birth date in YYYY-MM-DD format. Sets the year, month and day pillars. The year pillar turns at Beginning of Spring rather than on 1 January, and the month pillar turns at each of the twelve minor solar terms rather than at a calendar month boundary. | |
| lang | No | Response language (BCP 47). Supported: en, tr, de, es, hi, pt, fr, ru, zh-Hans, zh-Hant. Defaults to en. Coverage varies by domain, and a field with no translation in the requested language returns English. | en |
| time | Yes | Birth time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format. Sets the hour pillar, which is one of the four and carries the whole picture of later life and offspring. Each Earthly Branch covers two hours, so a birth within a few minutes of an odd hour can land in either. All four pillars are read in the local clock of the birth, and the day boundary is applied in that same clock; only the lunisolar calendar date itself is a world constant, fixed at UTC plus 8 so one instant has one Chinese date everywhere. | |
| count | No | How many ten-year luck pillars to return, 1 to 12. Eight covers eighty years from the start age, which reaches past a normal lifetime for most start ages. | |
| gender | Yes | Subject sex, used only to pick the luck-pillar direction: a male born in a yang-stem year and a female born in a yin-stem year run forward through the sexagenary cycle, and the other two combinations run backward. It affects nothing else in the response. | |
| compact | No | Set true for the same data in a compact shape: arrays of same-shaped objects arrive columnar as {"__cols":[names],"__rows":[[values]]}. Lossless, typically 40 to 52 percent fewer tokens. | |
| latitude | No | Birth latitude in decimal degrees. Accepted for consistency with the other birth-data endpoints and does not affect any part of a BaZi chart. Defaults to 0. | |
| timezone | Yes | IANA name (e.g. "America/New_York", "Europe/London", "UTC"), decimal hours (e.g. -5 for EST, 1 for CET), or a fixed UTC offset (e.g. "-05:00", "+01:00"). Prefer the IANA name: it is resolved to the DST-correct offset for the birth date, while a fixed offset or decimal is taken literally and will be wrong if it does not match the daylight-saving state on that date. Invalid timezones return 400 with a validation error. | |
| hourClock | No | Which clock the HOUR branch is read from. "clock" is civil time exactly as a birth certificate records it, which is what most calculators use and the default here. "local-mean" shifts to the mean sun over the birth longitude, a correction of up to 59 minutes at the edge of a wide time zone. "solar" adds the equation of time on top of that, up to a further 16 minutes. Both non-civil options need "longitude" in the request and return 400 without it. | clock |
| longitude | No | Birth longitude in decimal degrees. Positive is East, negative is West. Required when hourClock is "local-mean" or "solar", which shift the hour branch to the sun over the birth place; omitting it in either case returns 400. Ignored when hourClock is "clock". | |
| annualYears | No | How many consecutive years the annual overlay covers, 1 to 20. Ignored unless annualFromYear is present. | |
| dayBoundary | No | Which instant starts the sexagenary DAY, which only matters for a birth between 23:00 and 23:59. "midnight" is the classical position of the Ming compendium San Ming Tong Hui: the day turns at 00:00 and 23:00 to 23:59 is the late zi hour of the day that is ending, so the hour stem is taken from that day. "early-zi" turns the whole day at 23:00, the practice in Hong Kong, Taiwan and much of South East Asia. "split-zi" is the compromise most software implements and the default here: the day still turns at 00:00, but the hour stem is taken from the next day. The three give three different answers for a late-evening birth and identical answers for every other birth. | split-zi |
| yearBoundary | No | Which instant starts the sexagenary YEAR. "li-chun" is Beginning of Spring, around 4 February, and is the classical rule every BaZi text uses, so it is the default on this endpoint. "lunar-new-year" is the folk rule people mean when they say which animal they are, and it falls between late January and late February. The two disagree for any birth in the weeks between them: 14 February 2026 is a Wood Snake year under lunar-new-year and a Fire Horse year under li-chun. | li-chun |
| annualFromYear | No | First Gregorian year of the annual pillar overlay. Omit it to leave annualPillars out of the response entirely. The annual pillar is the year the chart is currently walking through, read against the ten-year luck pillar underneath it. |