A picture gets forwarded into a Chinese-language WeChat group: an open palm with six words written across the finger joints, and a caption promising your whole year in three seconds. A string of people post their birthdays underneath.
What is in the picture is Xiao Liu Ren. It does not read your year, and it has nothing to do with your birthday.
It is the lowest-barrier method in the Chinese divinatory repertoire. No chart, no compass, no app, no paper. Your hand is the instrument. Learn six names and you can cast. That is why it travelled further than anything else in the field.
The six palaces
Da An, Liu Lian, Su Xi, Chi Kou, Xiao Ji, Kong Wang. The order is fixed, because casting means counting around that circle.
The names carry half the reading. Da An is stillness and safety, usually meaning stay where you are. Liu Lian is delay, the thing that drags and doubles back. Su Xi is speed, news arriving fast and usually good. Chi Kou, literally red mouth, is argument and sharp words. Xiao Ji is small luck and things combining: it will come off, but not grandly. Kong Wang is emptiness, meaning nothing is there, or the question does not stand up.
A digression about the names. I have always thought Chi Kou is the best made of the six, because you hear the quarrel in it before anyone explains anything. Kong Wang is the worst, and it costs me time. It sounds like catastrophe and mostly means the matter has no substance yet, so people who draw it go pale on me and I end up explaining what it actually says before anything else can happen. The name is doing that, not the palace.
Casting it
Start at Da An and count the lunar month, Da An counting as one. From the palace you stop on, count the lunar day, that palace counting as one. From there count the double-hour, Zi as one through to Hai at twelve. The palace you finish on is the judgment.
You count the month, day and hour of the moment the question is asked. Not the birth data of the person asking. Everyone posting a birthday under that screenshot was off the rails at step one.
Worked through: twelfth day of the third lunar month, You hour. Three lands on Su Xi. Twelve counted on from Su Xi lands on Liu Lian. You is the tenth double-hour, and ten counted on from Liu Lian lands on Xiao Ji.
How the three palaces relate is a school question. In my line the last one is the judgment, and the first two show where the matter came from, the month palace as background and the day palace as the present state. Others read all three flat and combine them. Their verses differ from mine anyway.
I count by the lunar month, on the reasoning that this method grew out of the folk almanac and not the solar calendar. Plenty of people count by solar-term months instead, and I have never seen anyone argue the point through to a conclusion, myself included. On the few days a month where the two disagree I cast both.
Phases, spirits and directions
This is where the schools separate hardest. Search in Chinese and you will find three different tables for the same palace. Mine runs:
| Palace | Phase | Spirit | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Da An | Wood | Qing Long, the green dragon | East |
| Liu Lian | Water | Xuan Wu, the dark warrior | North (Kan) |
| Su Xi | Fire | Zhu Que, the vermilion bird | South (Li) |
| Chi Kou | Metal | Bai Hu, the white tiger | West (Dui) |
| Xiao Ji | Wood | Liu He, the six harmonies | East |
| Kong Wang | Earth | Gou Chen | Centre |
Da An and Xiao Ji are both wood and both east; what separates them is the judgment, not the direction.
This line works with six spirits and Teng She, the soaring snake, is not among them. The set of six beasts used in Liu Yao coin divination does include Teng She, so do not carry attributions across from one to the other.
Liu Lian and Xiao Ji are where the disagreement concentrates. Another widely taught arrangement puts Liu Lian in wood and the east, Xiao Ji in water and the north, exactly swapped from mine. I am not going to argue that here. Learn one line and stay inside it. Copy verses from two arrangements into a single reading and you will end up blaming the contradictions on the method.
Directions below the equator
The direction column has to be turned over in Sydney. Those directions sit on the Later Heaven trigram placement, Kan north and Li south, and that placement was fitted to heat and cold on the ground. Below the equator north is the hot side, so north and south exchange, the four corners exchange with them, and east and west hold. Liu Lian reads south here, Su Xi reads north, Da An and Xiao Ji are still east. The reasoning is in the piece on why facing south fails in Australia.
What it is actually good for
One matter, one question, an answer that lands soon and that you can check for yourself. Did I leave it in the house or in the car. Is he still coming, and roughly when. Driving out to the airport, will I catch them.
That is the resolution the instrument has. Six palaces, three counts. Ask it which trade you should have spent your life in and it hands you one word out of six, after which the next thousand words are supplied by you.
Why it gets misused
Three things stack up.
It is learned too fast. Bazi wants stems and branches, the ten gods, the luck pillars. Liu Yao wants the coin casting, the six relatives, the moving lines. Both take real time before you are any use. Xiao Liu Ren takes two minutes, and you can be reading for other people the same afternoon. There is nothing at the door, so plenty of people with no business reading for anyone are doing it anyway.
The verses are too catchy. Every palace comes with a few lines of rhymed judgment, easy to memorise and phrased with total confidence, telling you which way a lost object went and when the traveller arrives. Whoever memorises them feels they are holding a book of answers. Several versions circulate with noticeable differences in wording, and hardly anyone checks which one they learned.
A bad reading can always be talked round, and this is the serious one. The six palaces are wide. Liu Lian covers a three-day delay and a three-month one equally comfortably. Kong Wang covers there was never anything in it and the time has not come yet. Chi Kou covers a real argument and a conversation that nearly became one. At that width, everything matches something. A hit proves the method works; a miss means the questioner asked without sincerity, or the matter is still inside the Liu Lian stretch and has not finished dragging. Nobody has to be lying for this. The explanation arrives on its own and the person offering it generally believes it, which is how you get the group chat scenes: someone counting on their fingers to settle whether a visa will come through, whether a case will be won, whether an elderly parent will get past this one. Those questions share a shape. High stakes, long horizon, many moving parts, and the person asking is at the exact point of most wanting a definite answer. Six palaces cannot supply that. Whatever certainty comes out of the count was carried in by the person listening.
Visas, court and property are the three things I get asked about most in Australia, and none of them should be settled by counting on fingers. Illness goes to a doctor, legal matters to a lawyer, visas and money to a licensed adviser. What a divination can do there is at most help someone say out loud a decision they have already made.
Do I still use it
Yes. Standing somewhere with nothing in my hands and a small question in front of me, nearly always about where a person or an object is.
For a house, a chart or a date, I sit down and draw the thing properly. That is a different job.