Hour Stem Table for Xin 辛 Day: All 12 Hour Pillars

For a Xin 辛 (Xīn) day pillar, this bazi hour stem table for Xin day supplies the last of the four pillars. Xin is yin Metal — jewellery, the fine blade, refined and particular. It pairs with Bing under the Five Rats rule, so its day opens on the Rat hour 戊子.

The 12 hour pillars for a Xin 辛 day

How the Five Rats rule builds this column

The table is not memorised folklore; it is arithmetic. The Five Rats rule (五鼠遁 wǔshǔdùn) states: hour stem index = (day-stem-index mod 5) × 2 + hour-branch-index, mod 10. Day stems pair — 甲/己, 乙/庚, 丙/辛, 丁/壬, 戊/癸 share columns. That is why a Xin day and a Bing day produce identical hour pillars: both open the Rat hour on 戊 and walk the same twelve steps. Once the Rat hour’s stem is fixed, every later hour simply advances one stem in sequence, so you only ever need to remember where the day starts.

Worked example

Take the common case: born on a Xin day at 11:40. Eleven-forty falls in the Horse hour (午, 11:00–12:59), so the hour pillar is 甲午 (Jiǎ Wǔ). The stem 甲 is Wood — Wealth for a Xin Metal Day Master — sitting on the Fire branch 午, which is the Officer element. Wealth generating Officer at the destination pillar is a classically favourable signature, the kind of detail that only appears once the hour is fixed correctly.

Every hour stem as a ten god for Xin

Because the Day Master is fixed at Xin, each hour stem in the table above arrives carrying a definite ten god (十神 shíshén). Reading down the column, the day opens on resource, moves through peers, output, wealth, and closes the working hours on power:

The hour palace governs children, output and later life, so the god seated there describes the flavour of those chapters. A Xin day birth in the Rabbit hour puts Friend 比肩 at the destination — peers, self-reliance, a later life among equals. A Rooster-hour birth puts Seven Killings 七杀 there — pressure, command, children who test you into strength. Same day, different clock, very different ending.

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 Xin-day column begins on 戊子 and closes twelve steps later on 己亥.

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 Xin-day birth logged near a boundary such as 12:57, 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 Xin days

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

What the branch hides beneath the stem

The visible stem is only half the hour pillar; each branch carries hidden stems (藏干 cánggān) that a full reading weighs as well. Return to the 11:40 example: the Horse branch 午 hides Dīng 丁 (Yin Fire) and Jǐ 己 (Yin Earth). For the Xin Day Master that is Seven Killings 七杀 and Indirect Resource 偏印 tucked underneath the visible Wealth stem — a more layered destination than the surface suggests. Or take a Rooster-hour birth: 酉 hides only Xīn 辛 (Yin Metal), giving the Day Master a clean root of its own element in the hour, which counts toward chart strength. The full lookup is on the hidden stems table, and the logic of stems and branches working as one alphabet is set out under heavenly stems and earthly branches.

If the birth time is not known

A Xin-day chart without an hour is still three-quarters of a chart. The Day Master, the season of birth and the year remain readable, so strength, structure and luck pillars can all be judged; what goes dark is the children and later-life palace and whichever ten god the hour would have seated there. Before giving up on the hour, check the birth certificate and hospital record, then ask family for the texture of the story — before dawn, during lunch, just after the evening news. Because each hour is a two-hour block, an approximate memory is often enough to fix the branch. If two candidate hours survive, cast both on this table and compare: a 丁酉 hour and a 戊戌 hour give a Xin Day Master completely different destinations, and the life usually tells you which one it has been living.

What the hour pillar governs

The hour is the destination pillar — children, output, ambition and the later chapters of the road. It is the derived pillar, produced by the Five Rats rule (五鼠遁 wǔshǔdùn) that the master hour stem table lays out in full. Its yang-Metal sibling, the Geng day hour table, opens its Rat hour on 丙子 rather than Xin’s 戊子.

Skip the counting entirely — plot your Xin-day chart free with the calculator, which fixes the hour pillar and the late-Zi rule for you.