Wu

Wu is growth at its densest, the point where a thing has topped out and settled. As an image it is high commanding ground, an old city wall, a run of hills — earth with real weight in it, the kind that stops something rather than yielding to it. It is also the stem that talks about money most directly of the ten: land, buildings, cash, capital.

• Money and capital: the cash actually on hand, the capital already put into the thing, and reserves solid enough to sit out a bad year.
• Property: land and buildings, and the heavy immovable objects on the ground that shelter and block.
• Temperament: hot-tempered and unbending at once — blunt, principled to the point of stubbornness, deep rather than obvious. Not something that can be pushed, and not something that can be bent.
• Because Wu is both the money and the ground it rests on, the chart quotes it twice: the heaven-plate figure is what is in hand now and which direction the balance is tilting, while the earth-plate figure is the capital already sunk and how solid the footing under that number really is.

On a money question, Wu and Life Gate (生门) are not saying the same thing. Wu is the capital and the cash flow — what is in hand and what has been put in. Life Gate is the profit, what the work earned. A proper reading of wealth looks at both, and collapsing them into one number is how a chart with plenty of capital and no earnings gets called a good year.

Nature

The person involved needs solid ground underfoot, and looks at the whole picture before looking at their own place in it. Responsibility and a given word carry real weight here, which is precisely why the word is slow in coming — anything agreed to will be carried the entire way. When something changes they look first and move second. The surface is calm, and there is a great deal more stored underneath than ever shows.

Style

Steady, and in no hurry for the result. The person involved is good at pulling scattered resources into one system that will still be running in five years. The more unstable things get around them, the more they function as the fixed point everybody else navigates by.

Strength

Bearing weight, and planning a long way out. An idea reaching the person involved actually becomes a thing that exists instead of staying an idea — management, coordination, and building the rules other people then work inside. It compounds: the longer they hold a position, the harder they are to dislodge from it.

Impression

Presence without noise. The person involved is difficult to move and therefore ends up as the one a group leans on when something has gone wrong. No edge on display, and a reliability that lets everybody else relax a little. Unremarkable on first meeting, and heavier every year after that.

Pitfall

Caution kept well past its usefulness — the window opens and closes while the person involved is still checking. Pressure gets swallowed rather than spoken about, and change is met a beat too slowly. Wary of losing their balance, they resist the very adjustment that would have kept it.

In a building, Wu is the heavy, fixed, protective part of it: beams, courtyard walls, boundary walls, and everything put together out of concrete, brick and stone.

• Objects: ceramics and earthenware, brick, tile and cement work, rock and masonry walls, the safe — and gold, silver and jewellery, along with wherever the money is actually kept.
• Buildings and places: courtyards, the living room, embankments and bridges, cemeteries and memorial grounds, agencies and consultancies, and cement works.
• Outdoors, read high ground, old city walls, hills, tall buildings and houses, courtyard walls, bridges and utility poles.

Wu is frequently read in combination rather than alone: paired with Bing (丙) it becomes a transformer or a communications tower, and paired with Xin (辛) or Geng (庚) it becomes a utility pole. On its own, Wu is only ever earth — it takes the second stem before the chart is naming a specific object.

Also considered as a secondary indicator for: Business Opening.