Article 2 of plotting the ZWDS chart manually.
There are 12 palaces in a ZWDS chart that represents the various aspects of our life’s journey and destiny, arranged on the chart in an anti-clockwise direction. The 12 palaces are Self, Siblings, Spouse, Children, Wealth, Health, Travel, Friends, Career, Property, Mental & Parents.
First we need to convert the date of birth and time to a Chinese lunar calendar date before we can place the Self palace in the appropriate location and then the rest. You can convert your date of birth to a Chinese lunar calendar easily here.
Consider the case of a person born on 24th March 1964 @ 4:46am, which is a Jia Chen year, so the Yin palace will have the Bing as the lead stem. If you are not sure what I’m talking about, refer to this post.
The Chinese lunar date is February 11th, 1964 hence this person is said to be born on the 11th day of the 2nd month in the Rooster year.
Next we need to determine the hour pillar of birth. These are 1-Zi (11pm-1am), 2-Chou (1-3am), 3-Yin (3-5am), 4-Mao (5-7am), 5-Chen (7-9am), 6-Si (9-11am), 7-Wu (11am-1pm), 8-Wei (1-3pm), 9-Shen (3-5pm), 10-You (5-7pm), 11-Xu (7-9pm) & 12-Hai (9-11pm).
From the Yin palace, going clockwise to Mao and so on, we will assign the 10 Heavenly stems in order until we reach the Zi, which will repeat the Bing and Ding stems again.
Knowing that this person is born in the 2nd lunar month and the 3rd hour pillar in that day, we go forward from Yin as 1 and end in Mao as the 2nd palace for the month of birth.
Then from Mao as 1, we now go backwards to Chou as the 3rd palace which represents the Self palace. The rest of the 12 palaces are placed on the chart in an anti-clockwise direction to complete the chart as above.