Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches: A Saju Chart Reference

Every pillar on a saju or BaZi chart is one Heavenly Stem written over one Earthly Branch. There are ten stems and twelve branches, and the PillarAtlas result card shows them as single Chinese characters. This page is the lookup table: what each character is called, which element it is usually taught with, and, for branches, which animal and two-hour block it belongs to.

Have your characters ready (free, no account): run the Saju calculator and keep the result open. You will match each character on your chart to a row below.

How to use this page

1. Generate your chart and note the four columns: year, month, day and hour.
2. In each column, the top character is a stem. Find it in the first table.
3. The bottom character is a branch. Find it in the second table.
4. Start with the stem in the day column. That is your Day Master, and it is the label most readers use as the reference point. How to Find Your Day Master walks through it step by step.

If the words "pillar", "stem" and "branch" are still new, read Saju Meaning: How to Read the Labels on Your Chart first. That page explains what the labels are for; this one tells you which character is which.

The ten Heavenly Stems

The stems run in a fixed order. Each one is traditionally paired with one of five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, water) and a polarity, yang or yin. The stems come in pairs: a yang and a yin stem for each element.

How the five elements feed and restrain one another, and how to count them on your own chart, is covered in Five Elements in Saju: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water Explained.

A quick way to remember the order: two woods, two fires, two earths, two metals, two waters, always yang first.

The twelve Earthly Branches

Branches are the lower characters. Popular culture knows them as the twelve zodiac animals, but on a chart they work as calendar markers for years, months, days and hours. Each branch also covers one two-hour block of the day, which is how your birth time becomes the hour pillar.

Two notes on the hour column:

• The first block, 子, starts at 23:00 and crosses midnight. The PillarAtlas calculator changes the day at midnight, so a birth at 23:30 keeps the date you entered for the day pillar. Some schools start the new day at 23:00 instead, which is why late-night charts can differ between tools.
• The calculator uses the local clock time you enter, with no time-zone or true-solar-time correction. Near the edge of a block, a few minutes can change the hour pillar. Saju Birth Time: What the Hour Pillar Needs explains what to do if you are unsure.

How stems and branches combine: the cycle of sixty

Stems and branches advance together, one step at a time: 甲 with 子, then 乙 with 丑, then 丙 with 寅, and so on. Because there are ten stems and twelve branches, the pairing only repeats after sixty steps. This is the sexagenary cycle, and every pillar on your chart is one of those sixty pairs.

One consequence is easy to check on your own chart: a yang stem always sits on a yang-position branch and a yin stem on a yin-position branch. You will never see 甲 over 丑, for instance. If a chart shows that combination, it has been copied wrongly.

Common mix-ups

• "My animal is my whole chart." The year branch gives the familiar zodiac animal, but it is one character out of eight. Your Day Master comes from the day column, not the year. Which animal a chart uses also depends on Ipchun, not Lunar New Year; see Korean Zodiac Animals and Saju: Why Your Chart Year Can Differ.
• "Same animal, same person." Everyone born in the same year shares a year branch. The month, day and hour columns are where charts start to separate.
• "Two 辛 or two 申 must be a typo." Stems and branches have separate sets of names; the Korean readings of 辛 and 申 happen to sound alike. Check the position: top is a stem, bottom is a branch.
• "The elements are a personality test." Element labels are how traditional systems group the characters. Reading them as fixed traits skips the step where a reader looks at the whole chart.

Where this fits on PillarAtlas

The free chart shows you the characters; this page helps you name them. Interpretation sits on top of that, and Saju Reading: What Your Four-Pillar Chart Can (and Can't) Tell You covers what a reading can and cannot claim. For what the free layer includes, see Free Saju Reading: What You Get Without Paying.

Two things are not live yet. Two-person compatibility readings are not available on PillarAtlas, and purchases are not open, so nothing on the site charges a card. We will say so on these pages when that changes.

A 5-minute practice loop

1. Run the Saju calculator for your own date or a made-up one.
2. Write the eight characters on paper, stems on top.
3. Label each stem with its element and polarity from the first table.
4. Label each branch with its animal from the second table.
5. Circle the day stem. Then re-run with an unknown time and confirm only the hour column disappears.

CTA: Look up your own characters with the Saju calculator

Entertainment-only disclaimer

PillarAtlas charts and guides are for learning and entertainment. They are not medical, psychological, financial or legal advice, and no outcome is guaranteed.

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