Skip to main content
BaZiBaZi — The Open Guide to the Four Pillars System

Worked examples

Ten famous charts, read honestly

Most BaZi sites cherry-pick the wins. These ten case studies are deliberate stress tests: famous public figures with dense biographical records, where you can check the chart against what actually happened. We call out where the reading lines up and where it doesn’t.

Every reading on this page was generated by the same engine that powers the free chart calculator on this site, with no editing. We then sit the reading next to the biographical record and grade it as honestly as we can. If the reading lined up, we say so. If it didn’t, we say that too.

The rule we use

Every case study has to include at least one place where the chart reading does notobviously fit the biographical record. A chart that predicts everything in retrospect is an unfalsifiable horoscope, not an empirical model. The point of these pages is to show where the model has traction and where it doesn’t.

Several of these ten cases include major historical events — a cancer diagnosis, a radiation exposure, the Holocaust, a poll tax revolt, a multi-decade triangular marriage — that the chart does not predict at all. That’s information about the model’s reach, and it belongs in front of the wins, not hidden behind them.

1955–2011

Steve Jobs

丙辰
Yang Fire on Dragon

An Indirect Resource chart that predicts the Reed College auditing story almost verbatim — and says nothing about the cancer that killed him.

Read the case study →
1893–1976

Mao Zedong

丁酉
Yin Fire on Rooster

A textbook Seven Killings structure with the General's Star, Heavenly Noble, and Academic Star all stacked in the day pillar. The chart reads the revolutionary. It has no opinion about the Great Leap Forward famine.

Read the case study →
1867–1934

Marie Curie

辛卯
Yin Metal on Rabbit

A Direct Resource structure — the credentialed-learning archetype — reads almost too cleanly on the woman who won two Nobel Prizes. The radiation poisoning that killed her is not in the chart either.

Read the case study →
1769–1821

Napoleon Bonaparte

甲午
Yang Wood on Horse

A Yang Wood day master with Yang Metal Seven Killings overhead in the hour pillar — the classical 'blade over the tree' configuration that maps almost perfectly onto a military conqueror. Birth time uncertain.

Read the case study →
1954–

Oprah Winfrey

乙酉
Yin Wood on Rooster

A Yin Wood chart with a 巳酉丑 Three Harmony trio flowing to Metal — a structural pattern associated with broadcast reach and institutional durability. The childhood abuse she survived is a place where the chart is silent, not loud.

Read the case study →
1930–

Warren Buffett

壬子
Yang Water on Rat

A Yang Water day master sitting on its own branch — the cleanest possible natal support configuration — with an Indirect Resource structure that reads the compounding-autodidact archetype. The chart does not name Benjamin Graham, and has nothing specific to say about the 32-year triangular marriage.

Read the case study →
1929–1945

Anne Frank

戊子
Yang Earth on Rat

A Yang Earth day master in Direct Resource structure — the scholarly-anchor archetype — with a half harmony pulling the chart toward Water, the element of recorded interior voice. The chart reads the diarist almost exactly. It is entirely silent on the Holocaust, which is the single clearest place on this site where the model ends.

Read the case study →
1875–1961

Carl Gustav Jung

己丑
Yin Earth on Ox

A Yin Earth day master with triple Tai Ji Noble across month, day, and hour — the single clearest BaZi marker for profiles that turn toward depth and systems — embedded in an Establishing Officer structure of the self-standing founder. The 1913 break with Freud is not in the chart.

Read the case study →
1925–2013

Margaret Thatcher

庚午
Yang Metal on Horse

Yang Metal is literally the Blade archetype. The woman the Soviet military press nicknamed the Iron Lady has a chart whose most basic label matches the nickname almost word for word — and a Heavenly Noble in the year pillar for the improbable Grantham-to-Oxford route. The poll tax riots that ended her government are not in the chart.

Read the case study →
1881–1973

Pablo Picasso

癸巳
Yin Water on Snake

A Yin Water day master whose most significant structural feature is a transformed 戊癸 stem combination pulling into Fire — the chart reads as an identity continuously converting itself into output. 50,000 works across a lifetime. The extraordinary personal cost to the women around him is nowhere in the chart.

Read the case study →

What BaZi is good at

Across these five cases, the engine does best at what practitioners have always said it does best: describing how someone metabolizes the world. Career orientation, learning style, leadership posture, the kind of work someone is likely to sustain for decades. When the chart lines up, it usually lines up here.

The archetypes are not magic. They are dense clusters of tendencies that tend to co-occur — and in a well-documented life, you can see the cluster.

What BaZi is bad at

Predicting discrete events. The chart does not predict cancer, does not predict a plane crash, does not predict famine, does not predict Waterloo. Specific dated outcomes are the brittle end of the model, and any practitioner claiming otherwise is fitting stories to data after the fact.

It is also bad at moral accounting. The chart does not flag someone as a good or bad person. Mao’s chart and a beloved schoolteacher’s chart can share the same ten-god structure — what they did with it is downstream of everything the chart does not measure.