Yao Ming — BaZi Chart Analysis

Yao Ming is a former professional basketball star turned executive from Shanghai. After leading the Shanghai Sharks in the CBA, he was drafted first overall by the Houston Rockets and became the NBA’s most prominent Chinese player. An eight-time All-Star and five-time All-NBA selection, he later moved into leadership as president of the Chinese Basketball Association.

The chart, as computed

The chart below is computed rather than looked up. Solar terms set the Month pillar and 立春 sets the Year pillar, so neither follows the Gregorian calendar, and a birth date close to either boundary lands differently than a naive reading of the date would suggest.

Day Master: 戊 (Wu, yang Earth). The engine reads this chart's day master as somewhat weak, in a 从儿格 (Cong Er) structure — a follow-the-output structure — the chart succeeds through what it produces rather than what it holds.

No birth hour is on record for Yao Ming. The hour pillar is therefore omitted rather than guessed, and nothing in this reading depends on it — no hour-branch relation, no luck-cycle direction, and no claim that would need the fourth pillar to stand up. Three pillars is a smaller chart, not a less accurate one.

What the ten gods put where

• Year stem — 食神 (Shi Shen): the output — expression, craft, ease of production.
• Month stem — 正官 (Zheng Guan): legitimate authority — office, rules, reputation.

The Ten Gods are relational labels, not qualities: each one names how a stem stands to the Day Master, so the same 干支 means something different in a different chart. That is why the table above is worth more than any general description of Wu people.

The branch relations the engine found

• 三合半合 · a half-trine — 申 (Shen) / 子 (Zi), in the year and day branches, resolving to Water. Two of the three branches of a trine frame, so the pull toward that element is real but partial.
• 六破 · a break — 子 (Zi) / 酉 (You), in the day and month branches. A destabilising relation, weaker than a clash.

Reading it

A Cong Er structure — follow-the-output, the rarest of the special structures in this corpus and the only instance in either cohort. A somewhat weak Wu Earth day master with Shi Shen on the year and Zheng Guan on the month, and a Shen–Zi half-trine resolving to Water beneath. A follow-the-output chart is read as one that succeeds through what it produces rather than through what it holds, and classically it does not want the day master strengthened — which inverts the usual advice for a weak day master.

What this page does not claim

This is interpretation of a computed configuration, and the boundary matters. Nothing above says the chart caused anything, and nothing above was reverse-engineered from what the subject is known to have done. Where the birth hour is not on record, the hour pillar is absent rather than estimated.

This is not a substitute for medical, financial or legal advice.

Work out your own chart

To compare this against your own chart, run it through the BaZi chart calculator — it uses the same solar-term boundaries as the table above. Definitions for anything unfamiliar are in the BaZi glossary, and the celebrity index lists the other charted figures.

Birth data as held on file: 1980-09-12, hour unknown. The birth-data source is cited on the Chinese edition of this page.