What is the Long Chi star?

Some people make a presentation from the same material as everyone else, and theirs just looks better. Some people fix something offhand and leave it working better than before. When practitioners see someone like that, they often go looking for the Long Chi star on the chart. It is a very light minor star about ingenuity and skill with your hands, and it often appears together with Feng Ge. Draw your chart first and see which palace your Long Chi is in.

What kind of star is Long Chi

Long Chi and Feng Ge are called "Long Chi Feng Ge" together, and Xingge reads the pair as taste and ingenuity: a keen sense for aesthetics and handwork, suited to things that call for attention to detail. Of the two, Long Chi leans more toward "being able to make it": craft, technique, finished work. Feng Ge leans more toward "being able to see it": how you dress, how things present, the overall style. The Zi Wei Dou Shu Quan Shu (The Complete Book of Zi Wei Dou Shu) leaves only a placement verse for these two, with no commentary, so every reading of them comes from later common practice. The talent and prestige stars lesson covers this group of minor stars.

How Long Chi is placed

Long Chi goes by the branch of your birth year. The An Long Chi Feng Ge Jue in volume two of the Quan Shu is a single line:

Long Chi: Zi at Chen, forward. Feng Ge: Zi at Xu, backward.

That is, Long Chi treats the Chen palace as the Zi year and counts forward to your birth-year branch; Feng Ge treats the Xu palace as the Zi year and counts backward. So for a Zi year Long Chi is in Chen, for Chou in Si, for Yin in Wu, and so on forward, with a Hai year in Mao.

How Long Chi and Feng Ge sit relative to each other

One counts forward and the other backward, so how the two stars relate changes with your birth year:

• Born in a Mao or You year: Long Chi and Feng Ge share a palace (both in Wei for a Mao year, both in Chou for a You year), and that palace has the strongest flavor of talent.
• Born in a Zi or Wu year: the two are in opposite palaces, Chen and Xu facing each other.
• Born in a Chou, Si, Wei or Hai year: the two sit in each other's trine and can see each other in the San Fang Si Zheng.
• Born in a Yin, Chen, Shen or Xu year: the two are one palace apart, flanking the Wei or Chou palace on either side.

So when you read Long Chi, find Feng Ge too and look at the two palaces together.

Long Chi in key palaces

• Life Palace: you have taste and ingenuity, a keen sense for aesthetics and handwork, and you care how the finished result looks. Putting that gift to use beats keeping it hidden.
• Career Palace: suited to work built on craft and taste, such as design, crafts, architecture, photography, cooking or restoration, where you tend to produce standout results. Each piece of work you build up becomes your résumé.
• Wealth Palace: income tends to relate to taste, design or craft. Things with good taste are worth spending on, too.
• Property Palace: your home is arranged in a style of your own; home is where you show your ingenuity.
• Fortune Palace: your pleasures are mostly in beautiful things; exhibitions, handcrafts and music all help you relax.

Long Chi with main stars, transformations and Annual Luck

• Main stars and the Six Auspicious Stars: on its own, Long Chi is very light. When it meets Wen Chang or Wen Qu, practitioners say your talents are more easily noticed; sharing a palace with detail-minded, craft-flavored main stars like Tian Ji or Lian Zhen, the ingenuity shows more clearly.
• The four transformations: with Hua Ke in Long Chi's palace, your work is readily recognized and recommended; with Hua Lu, your craft readily turns into income; with Hua Ji, it is often a matter of demanding too much of your work and never finishing the revisions, so set yourself a delivery date.
• Annual Luck: when the Annual Luck reaches Long Chi's palace, it's a good time to learn a craft, make a piece of work or put together a portfolio.

How different schools read Long Chi

Today's common placement all follows the Quan Shu verse "Zi at Chen, forward," and it stays the same if you switch Xingge to Zhongzhou placement.

Another placement in the Daoist Canon edition: in the Daoist Canon edition of Zi Wei Dou Shu (attributed to Chen Tuan, in the Ming supplement to the Daoist Canon), Long Chi is placed "at Chen, starting the Zi hour and counting forward to your birth hour." That goes by the birth hour, not the birth year. Keep this in mind when reading the old books; the Xingge chart follows the Quan Shu and uses the birth year.

In the reading, the Daoist Canon edition says Long Chi and Feng Ge "govern literary writing and success in the imperial exams," and that the person is "graceful and clever, refined, dignified, warm and good-natured." That is why quite a few fortune-telling books link them with exams and academic honors, saying that meeting Wen Chang and Wen Qu helps with study; others read them as refinement and caring about quality of life. Xingge reads them mainly as taste, ingenuity and craft, and doesn't treat them as a guarantee of exam luck.