The bagua map: where is your wealth corner (and why it matters).

The bagua is the single most useful diagram in feng shui.

It is also one of the most-searched questions about the practice. "Where is my wealth corner?" gets typed into search engines several hundred thousand times a year, and the top results are mostly wrong. They oversimplify. They mix up the two main methods. They tell you to put a fish tank somewhere without explaining why.

Here is the honest version.

What the bagua actually is.

The bagua (literally eight trigrams) is a map that overlays your home's floor plan and divides it into nine sectors: eight around the outside, one in the middle. Each sector corresponds to a life area.

The eight outer areas are:

  • Career (north)
  • Knowledge and self-cultivation (north-east)
  • Family and health (east)
  • Wealth and prosperity (south-east)
  • Fame and reputation (south)
  • Relationships and marriage (south-west)
  • Children and creativity (west)
  • Helpful people and travel (north-west)

The ninth sector, the centre, is called the tai chi. In a healthy home it is open and uncluttered.

The wealth corner is therefore the south-east of your home. We will come back to it.

How to overlay it on your floor plan.

This is where most articles get vague. There are two methods. They are different methods, used by different schools, and they sometimes give different answers.

Method 1: the compass method (Classical schools).

Stand in the geometric centre of your home with a compass. Find magnetic north. The wealth corner is the south-east section of the floor plan from there.

This is the method most working practitioners trained in the Classical tradition use. You will need a real compass (or a phone compass; both work). The advantage is that the wealth corner is in the same physical location no matter which door you enter from. The disadvantage is that it requires a bit more setup.

Method 2: the door-based method (Western BTB).

Stand at your front door, looking in. The wealth corner is the far back-left corner of the home as you face inward.

This is the method used by BTB Western feng shui, which was popularised in the United States in the 1980s. The advantage is that anyone can do it without a compass. The disadvantage is that the wealth corner moves depending on which door is "the front door", which can be ambiguous in modern homes.

Which method should you use?

Pick one. Stick with it.

The two methods disagree on placement but agree on the intent: the wealth corner is the area of the home you want to keep clean, well-lit, in working order, and aligned with the idea of growth.

If your home was built before 1900, or has a complex floor plan, the compass method is usually the more reliable. If your home is small or you live in a flat, BTB's door-based method is easier and gives a sensible answer.

We use the compass method at My Feng Shui Home, but we will tell you when we are using the other one.

Find your wealth corner in ten minutes.

Here is the practical version.

Step 1. Sketch a rough floor plan of your home on a piece of paper. Get the outline roughly right. Mark all the doors and windows.

Step 2. Find the geometric centre. (For a rectangular plan, draw the diagonals. They cross at the centre.) Mark it.

Step 3. Stand in the actual centre of your home. Open the compass app on your phone. Find south-east. (It is roughly halfway between south and east, biased about 45 degrees from each.)

Step 4. Walk in that direction until you reach the wall. The room you end up in (or the corner you end up at) is your wealth sector.

That is it. You know where the wealth corner is.

What to do with it.

Tradition says the wealth corner does well with wood (growing things), water (gentle flow), and purple (the colour associated with wealth in Chinese tradition).

In practice, the highest-leverage moves are simpler than that.

Clean it. If the wealth corner is currently a storage cupboard, a dusty shelf, or the place where you stack things you do not want to deal with, that is the first thing to fix.

Light it. A working bulb, or a small lamp, beats any other cure.

Add one living thing. A real plant. Not a cactus. Something soft-leaved like a small money plant, a peace lily, or a jade plant. The jade plant is the traditional wealth plant because its leaves are coin-shaped, but any healthy plant does the structural work.

Remove broken or dying things. A dying plant in the wealth corner is worse than no plant. The same goes for a broken lamp, a stained rug, or a chair you keep meaning to fix.

That is the simple version. About 80% of the benefit comes from those four moves.

What you should NOT put in the wealth corner.

A surprising number of articles tell you to add things that the tradition actually warns against. Here are the worst ones.

A bathroom. If your wealth corner happens to be a bathroom (it often is, in modern homes), do not add water cures. The bathroom is already too much water. Keep the door closed, the toilet seat down, and the room clean. That is the entire intervention.

A fish tank you cannot maintain. A neglected fish tank is worse than no tank.

Red walls. Red is the fire colour. In the south-east (the wealth corner), fire is the wrong element. It burns the wood. If your wealth corner is a red room, that is not a feng shui crisis, but it is something to know.

Heavy mirrors facing outward. Mirrors in the wealth corner reflect the energy back out. Save them for the inside walls.

Why the wealth corner matters.

The honest answer is: it might not, individually.

What the bagua map does well is give you a structured way to walk through your home and notice things you have stopped noticing. The wealth corner is a useful focusing device. It points at one corner of the home and asks: "have you been ignoring this?"

If the answer is yes, that corner is probably the one that pays the highest dividend on a small amount of attention.

If the answer is no, congratulations. Look at the next sector.

If you want to go deeper into the Compass School that produces the bagua, read the methodology page. It walks through the Eight Mansions system that personalises the eight directions for your birth year.

If you want to walk every room in your home with structured eyes, read the twenty-six changes you can make this weekend. The bagua tells you where; that article tells you what.

And if you want your personal four favourable directions (the ones that work with your Kua number), the calculator gives you all four in ten seconds.

The bagua is one map. The Kua number is the other. Most working feng shui uses both.