// FENG SHUI BASICS
A Kua Number (also called a Ming Gua) is a personal number from 1 to 9, calculated from your birth year and gender, used in the traditional Feng Shui system called Eight Mansions (Ba Zhai). It's one of the more genuinely documented formulas in popular Feng Shui — a real, repeatable calculation, not an interpretation that varies by practitioner.
Take the last two digits of your birth year, add them together, and reduce to a single digit — the same "keep adding digits" technique used in numerology.
Then, depending on your gender and whether you were born before or after the year 2000:
One exception: if the result is 5, it isn't used directly — males use 2 instead, females use 8.
Worked example: someone born in 1978.
Your Kua Number sorts you into one of two groups, each with four traditionally supportive compass directions:
| East Group | Kua 1, 3, 4, 9 — supportive directions: East, Southeast, North, South |
| West Group | Kua 2, 6, 7, 8 — supportive directions: West, Northwest, Northeast, Southwest |
In practice, this is used to decide which direction to face when sleeping, working, or positioning a desk — the idea being that facing one of your group's four directions is more supportive than facing the other four.
Feng Shui traditionally uses the lunar calendar, not the Gregorian one — meaning the "Feng Shui year" doesn't start on January 1st, it starts around the Chinese lunar new year, which moves date each year (roughly late January to mid-February). If your birthday falls in that window, you may technically belong to the previous year's calculation. Most simplified guides (including this one) use February 4th as an approximate cutoff rather than looking up the exact lunar new year date for your specific birth year — worth knowing if your birthday falls in that narrow window.
The formula and the East/West grouping are real, documented parts of the Eight Mansions tradition — not invented for this article. What the directions actually do for your luck, health, or relationships is a matter of Feng Shui tradition, not something with scientific backing. Same honest category as the rest of what's on this site: real math, symbolic meaning.
Want your Kua Number calculated automatically — plus your trigram, element, and full supportive-direction breakdown?
GET YOUR KUA READING →Does my Kua Number change over time?
No — it's fixed to your birth year and gender, so it stays the same for life.
Why does the formula need my gender?
The traditional Eight Mansions formula is genuinely binary in its classic form — it's the only input this specific system needs beyond your birth year.
What if my Kua Number comes out to 5?
Traditionally, 5 isn't used as a final personal Kua Number — males use 2 instead, females use 8, following the standard substitution rule.