Hour Stem Table for Wu 戊 Day: All 12 Hour Pillars

If the day pillar is a Wu 戊 (Wù) day, this bazi hour stem table for Wu day supplies the last pillar. Wu is yang Earth — the mountain, the retaining wall, the stable ground others stand on. Its day opens on the Rat hour 壬子, so the first stem of the day is 壬 Ren, broad Water meeting the high ground.

The 12 hour pillars for a Wu 戊 day

The ten god each hour places at the destination

The hour pillar is the children and later-life palace, and its stem is a ten-god seat. Read against a Wu Day Master, the twelve rows above seat these Ten Gods (十神 shíshén):

Notice the water hours — Rat, Ox, Dog, Pig — all seat Wealth for the mountain, while dawn’s Wood hours bring Officer and Killings. Which of these serves you is a strength question, settled with the strong-versus-weak guide and the Wu Earth Day Master profile.

Worked example

Take a Wu day birth at 11:50 — the Horse hour (午, 11:00–12:59). The hour pillar is 戊午 (Wù Wǔ). Stem and season are both at their most yang: Wu Earth baked by the Horse’s Fire. This is a hot, dry final pillar, and a reader would look to Water or Metal elsewhere in the chart to keep such Earth from cracking.

The hidden stems (藏干 cánggān) sharpen the picture. Wǔ 午 (Horse) conceals Dīng 丁 (Yin Fire) and Jǐ 己 (Yin Earth) — for a Wu Day Master, Direct Resource (正印 zhèngyìn) and Rob Wealth (劫财 jiécái). So beneath the visible Friend on the stem sit more warmth and more Earth: support upon support, which is exactly why this hour needs the rest of the chart to provide an outlet. The Horse hour page gives the branch its own reading.

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 Wu-day column begins on 壬子 and closes twelve steps later on 癸亥.

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 Wu-day birth logged near a boundary such as 04:56, 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 Wu days

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

From this page to your chart

The lookup takes a minute: confirm the day stem is 戊 (the upper character of the day pillar, identical to the Day Master), correct the recorded time toward solar time, match it to a double-hour, and take the pillar from the first table — then the ten god from the second. Anything within twenty minutes of a boundary deserves the correction before you commit.

When the birth time is missing

A Wu chart without an hour still stands on solid ground — literally: the season gate, the Day Master and the spouse palace all live in the other six characters. What goes quiet is the destination palace, so children and late-life questions stay provisional. Hunt for the time before abandoning it: hospital notes, family stories pegged to daylight or meals. If the field narrows to two or three double-hours, each candidate pillar above can be tried against the life so far — a practitioner’s rectification, not a guess. The one thing not to do is silently assume midday, which would hand this chart 戊午 and its double dose of Earth by default.

What the hour pillar governs

The hour is the destination pillar — children, output, ambition, later life. Alone among the four, it is derived rather than read off a calendar, through the Five Rats rule (五鼠遁 wǔshǔdùn) set out on the master hour stem table. Its yin-Earth partner, the Ji day hour table, opens its Rat hour on 甲子 — quite unlike Wu’s 壬子.

Skip the counting: plot your Wu-day chart free with the calculator to pin the hour pillar to the minute.