Luopan Direction Finder
Turn a compass bearing into a feng shui direction. Enter the bearing you read outside your front door and get the bagua palace, its element, its colours and what that corner of the house is for.
Read your direction
How to use it
- Stand outside your front door with a phone compass and read the bearing the door faces.
- Enter the bearing in degrees — the direction the door points, not the direction you are standing.
- Read the bagua palace, element and colour guidance for that direction.
How to take a reliable compass reading
Most of the direction readings people take are wrong, and it is almost always the environment rather than the compass. A phone compass is a magnetometer, and it will read whatever the largest nearby magnetic field is.
- Get away from metal. Stand at least three metres from cars, radiators, steel appliances, structural steel columns and speaker magnets. A lift lobby is one of the worst places to take a reading.
- Take three readings in the same spot and use the value that repeats. If the three readings all differ, the reading is unreliable.
- Use the door facing, not the door position. Stand outside and look back at the door, or note which way the door opens inward from outside. The bearing the door faces is the number you need.
- Check the compass is calibrated. On iPhone, a figure-eight motion calibrates the magnetometer. On Android, move the phone in a large circle in the shape of a figure eight.
Small apartment blocks with reinforced concrete, and any building with a lift core, are the hardest cases. If the readings are inconsistent, take the reading at the middle of the street in front of the building rather than on the threshold.
The eight palaces and what they govern
Each direction maps to one trigram from the I Ching, one element and one family role. This is the reference layer that sits under every directional feng shui rule you will meet.
| Direction | Trigram | Element | Governs |
|---|---|---|---|
| North | Kan ☵ | Water | Wisdom, adaptability, career, kidneys |
| Northeast | Gen ☶ | Earth | Stillness, study, concentration, hands and feet |
| East | Zhen ☳ | Wood | Growth, energy, new beginnings, liver |
| Southeast | Xun ☴ | Wood | Gentleness, wealth, receptivity, thighs | South | Li ☲ | Fire | Recognition, beauty, clarity, eyes and heart |
| Southwest | Kun ☷ | Earth | Nurturing, support, loyalty, digestion |
| West | Dui ☱ | Metal | Joy, sociability, pleasure, mouth and lungs |
| Northwest | Qian ☰ | Metal | Authority, ambition, decisiveness, head and lungs |
Turning a direction into a house
Your house's facing direction — the direction the main door points — is the single most useful fact about your home for feng shui purposes. It sets the element your home belongs to, it decides which bagua palace is your 'wealth position', and it anchors every sitting chart you will ever calculate.
Once you have the facing direction, the next layer is the annual chart, which rotates the nine stars through the same nine palaces every year. Run both and you have the two layers most feng shui advice actually operates on.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a luopan?
A luopan is a Chinese feng shui compass — a disc with a rotating magnetic needle mounted in a square plate marked with the Lo Shu grid and the twenty-four mountains. It is the traditional instrument for measuring a site's directions precisely. A phone compass is a modern substitute that works well enough for a house, but not precisely enough to map a single mountain, so the readings differ slightly at the edges.
What if my phone compass gives inconsistent readings?
You are near a magnetic field. Move at least three metres away from metal and electronics and take three readings. If they still disagree, take the reading in the middle of the street in front of the property rather than standing in the doorway.
Should I enter the direction I am standing, or the direction the door faces?
Enter the direction the door faces. If you stand outside the house looking at the front door, the bearing on your compass is the direction the door faces. Standing inside facing outwards gives the same number.
How accurate does my reading need to be?
Accurate to within a few degrees is fine. The eight palaces are 45 degrees each, so a reading within about 20 degrees of a palace centre is comfortably inside it. What matters more is not being in the wrong palace entirely, which happens when the reading is off by more than about 22 degrees.