Nine periods

Meaning

The nine periods, 三元九運 sān yuán jiǔ yùn, the three ages and nine periods, are the clock of the Flying Stars. A cycle of 180 years divides into three ages of sixty, the upper, middle and lower, and each age into three periods of twenty years. Each period is ruled by one of the nine stars, the number of its place in the count: Period 1 by the 1 White, and so on to Period 9 by the 9 Purple. The present cycle began in 1864.

The period does two things. It is the time of a home: a building takes the period in which it was built or last fully renovated, and its whole chart is cast from that period’s number. And it is the time of the stars: in each period the period’s own star and the two after it are timely, the one before it waning and the rest dormant, so the same chart is read differently as the periods turn.

We are in Period 9, from Lichun 2024 to Lichun 2044, ruled by the 9 Purple: the 9, the 1 and the 2 are timely, the 8 is waning. In 2044 the cycle closes and Period 1 begins again.

In practice

• The year a home was built: the Home lens asks for it, suggests the period, and adds that if the home has been fully renovated since, that year should be given instead. Without a year it casts no chart.
• The states now: every palace’s reading gives each star’s state in the present period, whatever the home’s own period.
• Two homes, two periods: two neighbours facing the same way but built in different periods have different charts; a home renovated in full after 2024 takes Period 9’s.
• When schools differ: most take the year of building or full renovation, as Ulune does; some take the year one moved in. Ulune says which rule it follows.

Across traditions

• The sixty-year cycle: each age of sixty years opens on a Jia-Zi year, the first pair of the sixty, 1864, 1924 and 1984, so that the 180 years are three turns of the almanac’s cycle, and every period begins in a Jia year.
• Jupiter and Saturn: one great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn falls in each period, near its end, 1881, 1901, 1921, 1940–1941, 1961, 1980–1981, 2000, 2020, 2040; some modern writers link the periods to that rhythm, which the classics count by the calendar instead.
• Western ages: Western astrology speaks of long ages too, the Age of Aquarius among them, measured by the slow turn of the equinoxes over two thousand years; the Chinese periods are a human measure, twenty years, a generation’s house.

Origin and history

The Three Yuan, 三元, belong to the Chinese calendar’s count of sixty-year cycles; the Xuan Kong school gave each of their nine twenty-year parts a star of the Lo Shu and made the period the root of a home’s chart. Jiang Dahong, in the 17th century, wrote of the periods in his commentaries without revealing the whole method, and Shen Zhureng (1849–1906) set out the charts of each period as most schools use them. The present cycle’s count, from 1864, is the one practitioners share today.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune counts twenty years a period from 1864: a year’s period is its place in the cycle of 180, so 2026 is in Period 9 and 2044 opens Period 1. A home’s period comes from the year it was built or last fully renovated, by the calendar year alone: a home finished in January 2024, before Lichun, would strictly belong to Period 8, and the Home lens shows the year it used. In each period the period’s star and the two after it are timely, the one before waning, the others dormant. Ulune’s tests check the periods at their edges.

Correspondences