Hour Stem Table for Ding 丁 Day: All 12 Hour Pillars

For a Ding 丁 (Dīng) day pillar, this bazi hour stem table for Ding day completes the chart. Ding is yin Fire — the lamp, the candle, the inner flame that warms rather than blazes. Its day opens on the Rat hour 庚子, so the first stem of the day is 庚 Geng, hard Metal held to the small fire.

The 12 hour pillars for a Ding 丁 day

Worked example

Take a Ding day birth at 13:30 — the Goat hour (未, 13:00–14:59). The hour pillar is 丁未 (Dīng Wèi). The stem 丁 repeats the Day Master exactly, so this chart carries a Ding companion in its final pillar: in classical terms a Friend or Rob Wealth flavour sitting at the destination, which a reader treats as support for a weak Ding or crowding for a strong one.

The branch beneath is warm dry Earth, and its hidden stems (藏干 cánggān) — Jǐ 己 (Yin Earth), Dīng 丁 (Yin Fire), Yǐ 乙 (Yin Wood) for Wèi 未 (Goat) — give a Ding Day Master Eating God (食神 shíshén), a second Friend (比肩 bǐjiān) and Indirect Resource (偏印 piānyìn). The candle is doubled and rooted here: 未 is one of the branches where Ding’s own fire keeps a live ember. The Goat hour page reads that branch in full.

Reading the pattern, and reading the clock

Two things are worth noticing before you lift a pillar off this table. First, the pattern itself: as you move down the hours the branch stays fixed by the clock, but the stem climbs one step of the ten-stem sequence at every hour, looping from 癸 back to 甲 when it reaches the end. That single motion is the whole Five Rats rule at work, and it is why the Ding-day column begins on 庚子 and closes twelve steps later on 辛亥.

Second, the clock. The times above are true solar times, tied to the sun’s real position rather than the figure on a birth certificate. Two corrections can push a birth across an hour line. One is the longitude gap between the birth city and the meridian its time zone is officially set to — in Singapore, where clocks run on UTC+8 while the island lies nearer 104°E, civil time can lead solar time by close to half an hour. The other is the equation of time, a seasonal drift of up to about a quarter-hour either way. For a Ding-day birth logged near a boundary such as 14:58, those few minutes decide which row above is genuinely yours. The calculator linked below applies both corrections for you, which is why its result can differ from a hand count taken off raw clock time.

The ten-god seat, hour by hour

Each row of the table is more than a label — the hour stem plays a Ten God (十神 shíshén) against the Ding Day Master, and that god occupies the children and later-life palace:

A lamp does not want the same company as a bonfire: how welcome each god is depends on how strong this particular Ding burns, which is the judgement the Ding Fire Day Master profile walks through.

The late Zi (子) note for Ding days

The Rat hour is 23:00–00:59, crossing midnight. A birth from 23:00–23:59 on a Ding day takes the next day stem’s Zi pillar for the hour, while the day pillar stays Ding. This is the late-Zi (晚子時 wǎn zǐshí) convention. Because respected schools split on it, we lay out both readings on the birth hour and hour pillar page.

Ding day hour questions

How do I check this against my own chart?

Verify the day stem is 丁 (the upper character of the day pillar — the same character as your Day Master), correct the birth time toward solar time, find the double-hour, and lift the pillar from the first table. The second table then tells you which ten god sits at your destination.

What if I only know the birth time roughly?

An approximate time is workable if it clearly falls inside one double-hour; a time near a boundary, or between 23:00 and 00:59, is not settled until corrected. When no time is known at all, read the year, month and day on their own — the Day Master, season and spouse palace are intact — and let candidate hours be tested against known life events before any is adopted. Avoid writing in a guess; a wrong hour stem plants a wrong ten god at the destination.

What the hour pillar governs

The hour is the destination pillar — children, output, ambition, the later chapters. It cannot be copied off a calendar; it is derived through the Five Rats rule (五鼠遁 wǔshǔdùn) shown whole on the master hour stem table. Its yang-Fire sibling, the Bing day hour table, opens its Rat hour on 戊子 rather than Ding’s 庚子.

Let the calculator do the derivation — plot your Ding-day chart free and read the hour pillar to the minute.