Why your chart is written in letters.

There are ten stems. They are the five elements in two polarities each, so naming both names exactly one stem. Wa+ is the plus side of water and there is no other.

This part is not ours. English-language practice has used element and polarity for a long time, writing 壬 as “Yang Water”. The codes are that convention with the words shortened, and a sign in place of yin and yang: the same distinction, without a reader having to be told first that yin is not the worse half.

Every mark in a chart is one of these ten to your build. The report says Backing, Pressure, Craft, and it says them a lot, so this is where they are defined once. They are named by what they do rather than by what they are called at home, the same rule the rest of the site follows.

They come in five pairs. One of each pair is the straight version and the other has an edge on it, and the pair behaves as one thing often enough that the reading names the family too.

The report calls them Drive, Emotion, Calm, Logic and Flow rather than Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. The classical names are the material; these are what having a lot of the material does, which is the thing a mix of five percentages is actually telling you.

A stem passes through twelve states as it moves round the twelve branches, and your build is in a different one in each of your four. This is the part every English write-up gets wrong: Still is not a bad chart and At peak is not a good one. What peaks next declines, and the tradition says so.

Yang stems run the cycle forward from their own 長生 branch and yin stems run it backward, which is the 陰陽異長生 convention. The table is checked against the 祿 positions: In office lands on the stem’s own 祿 branch for all ten.

The rule is the same one the ten forces follow: name a thing by what it does, keep the classical name beside it, and use no word that reads as a verdict. Where established English practice has its own term, that is here too, so a reader who goes and reads somewhere else can match them up.

Branches could not take the same treatment, and the reason is arithmetic. Ten stems over five elements divides. Twelve branches over five elements does not. Earth alone holds four of them, and they are two yang and two yin, so polarity does not separate them either. Any element code would collapse four branches into two.

So the code names the one thing that is true of a branch in every Mark: where it falls in the round of the seasons. Each season runs three, and the third is always the earth month that closes it. That is why the four earth branches are exactly the ones numbered 3, and why you never have to memorise which they are.

The round opens at 立春 rather than in January, so it begins with 寅, Spring 1.

A branch is a position in a cycle of twelve, and which cycle it counts depends on where it sits. The month branch really is a solar month. The others are not.

• The year branch is one of twelve years.
• The month branch is a solar month, running from one 節 to the next.
• The day branch is a place in the sixty day cycle.
• The hour branch is a two hour block.

This is why the codes name a season rather than a month. Writing the year branch 申 as August would be wrong three times out of four, and even in the month Mark it would be off by about four days, since 寅 runs from 立春 to 驚蟄 rather than across February.

Nothing here is a summary or a simplification. Ten stem codes for ten stems, twelve branch codes for twelve branches, one to one in both directions. If you already read charts, you can put any BAAK page beside your own and the two either agree or one of us is wrong.

The characters stay on your report. The codes are here so a reader meeting a chart for the first time is not asked to learn a script before they learn anything about themselves.