Center Palace

The nine palaces are the ground layer of a chart — the environment, the space and the direction the person involved is standing in. Each of the other eight carries a trigram, a compass direction and a gate; the Center Palace has none of the three. That is not something missing from the record, it is the definition. The eight trigrams were given the eight directions and there is no ninth direction left over for the middle, and a gate is a way out, which is not something the middle of a square has. So the cell at the very centre of the chart is also the emptiest cell on it — and that is why a chart carries nine stars but only ever eight gates. One thing does sit here on every chart: Tian-Qin (天禽), in its home position. But the middle has no palace of its own to be read in, so a second copy of that star travels out with Tian-Rui (天芮) marked as lodged, and it is that copy — with whatever stems have come along — that the reading is actually taken from, at the Kun Palace (坤宫) in the Southwest.

• No direction: Kan Palace (坎宫) holds North, Li Palace (离宫) South, Zhen Palace (震宫) East, Dui Palace (兑宫) West. The four cardinal and four intercardinal directions are fully taken by the eight trigrams, and the Center, sitting in the middle of them, falls on none of them.
• No trigram, and therefore no gate: the middle square of the eight-trigram diagram is empty, and there are only ever eight gates because there is no ninth way out to open at the centre. That is the reason the gate count and the star count never match.
• Its numbers are unusual too: each of the other eight palaces carries an Earlier Heaven number and a Later Heaven number. The Center has neither, and is left with the five-phase numbers 5 and 10.
• On the table of body correspondences the middle cell is blank in the same way — there is no part of the body assigned to it.
• Tian-Qin appears twice, and only one of the two is the one to read: no trigram and no gate does not stop stars and stems from landing in the middle on a real chart. The centre square always shows Tian-Qin standing at home, unmarked. A second copy of it goes out with Tian-Rui (天芮) — whichever palace Tian-Rui has reached — carrying whatever Three Wonders or Six Instruments came with it, and that copy is annotated as lodged. Seeing the star in the middle is therefore not a mistake in the chart; the reading is simply taken from the lodged copy at the Kun Palace, not from the one sitting at home.

Empty is not the same as unimportant. The Center is the middle of the whole arrangement and the other eight are laid out around it. What it does not have is a meaning of its own to contribute — so when a judgement has to be made about something sitting in the middle, the substance is taken from the palace it hands over to.

Feng shui is one of the few places where the Center Palace has real content of its own: the table describing the state of a whole dwelling counts the central fifth palace in, and gives it both a strong and a weak form.

• When the energy is strong: the building is level and dignified with a broad presence — the upright, well-centred kind of property.
• When the energy is weak: old, and long overdue for repair.

The palace-by-palace list of outdoor places has no row for the Center — that table is laid out over the eight trigrams and has only eight cells. And the strong-and-weak description here is a verdict on the whole building, not on any one room.