About MingPan

Why it exists

Two things. First, Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore kept UTC+7:30 before 1982, not today’s UTC+8. A chart worked out with today’s timezone for someone born then is half an hour out — and we measured that for about one in four of them it changes the main star. How that was measured.

Second, readings online rarely say where they come from. “You are stubborn” — says which book, in which passage? We wanted a site where every line can be traced back to the text it came from.

How the content is made

The charts are calculation. The pillars, luck periods, palaces, main stars and transformations are computed by this site’s own code from published rules, and the same birth always gives the same chart. The birth time is corrected to true solar time from the birthplace longitude and the timezone actually in force in the birth year, from the IANA tz database. Where schools disagree on a rule, which one we chose is stated on sources and method.

The readings are quotations. Every line about you is quoted from a named classical work — Yuan Hai Zi Ping (渊海子平), San Ming Tong Hui (三命通会), Di Tian Sui (滴天髓), Qiong Tong Bao Jian (穷通宝鉴), Zi Ping Zhen Quan (子平真诠) and Zi Wei Dou Shu Quan Shu (紫微斗数全书) — from public-domain editions on Wikisource and the Chinese Text Project, with the section named. Alongside the quotations are short summaries in our own words — more on those below.

One exception: the almanac’s good-for and avoid lists. On the almanac, the day officer, ruling spirit, clash and hours are calculated. The daily lists of what a day is good for and what to avoid come from the open-source lunar calendar library (6tail), whose author built them from a popular Chinese calendar website’s data. They are not quoted from a classical text, and every page that shows them says so.

The English translations, and AI

The classics are in classical Chinese. The English translations were drafted with the help of AI, then checked by our own code against the Chinese, line by line: every star, stem and term the original names must appear in the English, and the English may not name one the original does not. A line that fails is fixed until it passes. Wherever a translation appears, “Show the original Chinese” puts the source beside it, so it can be checked rather than trusted.

The short plain-language lines that introduce each term — what a star “stands for”, say — are our own wording, drawn from those texts and also drafted with AI; they are not quotations, and the pages keep the two apart. The site’s code was written with AI assistance too. What we do not do is use AI to generate a reading: everything said about you is either calculation or quotation.

What we don’t do

• No account, and no saved charts: your birth details are used to cast the chart and nothing else. See privacy.
• No forecasts about living people — not their years ahead, their health or their lifespan. The famous people’s pages show the chart their public birth details give.
• No clauses that fix a woman’s outcome by her sex. The classics have some; they are left out, in the Chinese as well as the English, and the page says so.
• No compatibility scores. The classics have no such number.
• No charms, lucky objects or “cures” for sale.

Contact

Use the form below. A typo, a translation that reads badly, something you think is wrong — please say so. Writing about this? The press kit has the figures and dates.