On Women's Charts (Nv Ming Zhang)

A short chapter with a long history

This chapter is written in the idiom of its era: it advises reading a woman's chart for husband and children through calm and even qi. Its most useful instruction is a warning — the famous 'three marvels and two virtues' are empty phrases, and the peach-blossom and travelling-horse stars deserve only half a reading. In other words: prefer the structural reading over the auspicious-star labels, and refuse to build a life story from stock symbols. Readers today should treat the social framing as historical and the method as the part worth keeping.