About Us

SinoWisdomHub does two things: it lays open the reasoning behind a bazi calculation, and it attaches a source to every judgment about traditional and simplified usage.

The two look unrelated, but the same conviction sits underneath both: in a field where every conclusion looks much like every other, credibility comes from whether the work can be checked.

Why traditional Chinese comes first

Simplified and traditional are not a one-to-one relationship. They are one-to-many.

A single simplified character can correspond to several traditional ones, and which is correct depends on the meaning. Take 发 on its own: it has two traditional counterparts, one used in the word for hair, the other in the word for making a fortune. 后, 面, 里 and 松 are all the same situation.

Character-by-character machine conversion is bound to fail here — and the worst of it is that once it has failed, the result still reads perfectly smoothly.

Chinese metaphysics is unusually exposed to this. Two examples we have hit in practice:

• the second Earthly Branch, which automatic conversion mistook for the character meaning "ugly"
• the 干 of the Heavenly Stems, mistaken for the character meaning "to do"

Neither raises an error and neither looks strange, unless you happen to know the stems and branches. For the full comparison see Traditional/Simplified Confusables — the data on that page does not pass through automatic conversion, so both forms appear exactly as written.

This is why the site's database stores traditional Chinese only. The simplified edition is converted at the moment of output, and the conversion always looks up whole words, never single characters. The character and term database was built for exactly this.

How we decide what goes in

A judgment with no source is marked as such, and is not mixed in with the sourced ones. If "checked in a dictionary" and "filled in from memory" look identical in the database, then none of that data can be used.

The calculation is always published. How many minutes of DST were stripped, how far the true solar time correction moved the clock, which school's Zi-hour rule was applied — all of it is listed. You do not have to trust us; you can check.

Where it is uncertain, we say it is uncertain. For the options on which schools genuinely disagree (true solar time, which day the Zi hour belongs to), this site offers both and marks which is the common practice, rather than choosing a side for you and presenting it as the only answer.

Who it is for

• people who want a chart, but not from a black box that only announces the conclusion
• editors and writers who need simplified-to-traditional conversion and have been bitten by a machine doing it
• anyone producing content across the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau

What this site does not do

No fortune-telling service, no paid readings, no predictions of good or ill fortune. What the bazi section offers is traditional calculation and a written interpretation of it, for reference only.