Hour Stem Table for Jia 甲 Day: All 12 Hour Pillars

If your day pillar is a Jia 甲 (Jiǎ) day, this is the page you need to finish the chart: the full bazi hour stem table for Jia day, every double-hour matched to its clock range and its complete hour pillar. Jia is yang Wood, the tall tree, and its Rat hour opens on 甲子 — the cleanest starting point in the whole cycle, since the day stem and the first hour stem are the same character.

The 12 hour pillars for a Jia 甲 day

Worked example

Suppose the birth is on a Jia day at 16:20. Sixteen-twenty sits inside the Monkey hour (申, 15:00–16:59), so you read straight down to the Monkey row: the hour pillar is 壬申 (Rén Shēn). Notice the stem there is 壬 Ren, yang Water — Water feeding Wood, the Jia tree’s resource showing up in the final pillar. That is the kind of small structural clue the hour quietly adds.

The branch adds its own layer. The hidden stems (藏干 cánggān) of Shēn 申 (Monkey) are Gēng 庚 (Yang Metal), Rén 壬 (Yang Water) and Wù 戊 (Yang Earth). Against a Jia Day Master those play Seven Killings (七杀 qīshā), Indirect Resource (偏印 piānyìn) and Indirect Wealth (偏财 piāncái) — pressure, unconventional support and opportunity all folded beneath the visible pillar. The Monkey hour page takes that branch further.

The ten god each hour brings a Jia Day Master

Because the hour is a ten-god seat, every row of the table above puts a specific Ten God (十神 shíshén) in the children and later-life palace of a Jia chart:

Whether any of these is welcome depends on the Jia tree’s strength — a weak Jia is glad of the Rat hour’s Friend, a strong one finds it crowding. The Jia Wood Day Master profile and the strength guide supply that judgement.

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 Jia-day column begins on 甲子 and closes twelve steps later on 乙亥. Ji days share that 甲子 starting point under the Five Rats rule, so the Ji day hour stem table reads through the same twelve pillars.

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 Jia-day birth logged near a boundary such as 06:55 or 12:58, 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 late Zi (子) note for Jia days

The Rat hour runs 23:00–00:59, crossing midnight. A birth from 23:00–23:59 on a Jia day takes the next day stem’s Zi pillar for the hour, while the day pillar stays Jia. This is the late-Zi (晚子時 wǎn zǐshí) convention, and schools genuinely differ on it — some keep the hour on the same day. The full argument is on the birth hour and hour pillar page.

Using the table on your own chart — and without a birth time

The walk-through is short: confirm the day stem really is 甲 (it is the upper character of the day pillar, identical to your Day Master), convert the corrected birth time to its double-hour, and lift the pillar from that row. Then read the second table for the ten god now seated at your destination. If the birth time is unknown, the chart still stands on its other six characters — season, Day Master and spouse palace are untouched — but leave children and later-life questions provisional. A time remembered only as “late afternoon” narrows a Jia day to two or three candidate pillars, and testing each against known life events is how a practitioner shortlists the real one. Do not default to noon; that quietly plants 庚午 and its Seven Killings where they may not belong.

What the hour pillar governs

The hour is the destination pillar. In classical reading it colours children, output, ambition and the later chapters of life — the part of the chart that looks toward what you build and leave behind. It is derived, not calendrical, which is why the Five Rats rule (五鼠遁 wǔshǔdùn) matters; the master hour stem table shows how all ten day stems generate their hours. Compare a neighbour: the Yi day hour table runs the yin-Wood parallel and starts its Rat hour on 丙子 instead.

Find your exact hour pillar in seconds — plot your Jia-day chart free with the calculator, which applies the Five Rats derivation and the late-Zi rule automatically.