Yongzheng Had Officials' Charts Read. Did He Believe Them?

In the spring of 1722, a twelve-year-old boy named Hongli met his grandfather properly for the first time. The meeting took place at the Yuanmingyuan. That same year the emperor — Kangxi — took the boy into the palace to be raised at his side. Of Kangxi's nearly hundred grandsons, only one had been given that treatment before.

Filed alongside that story is a birth chart. Four pillars: 辛卯, 丁酉, 庚午, 丙子 — the thirteenth day of the eighth month, in the fiftieth year of Kangxi, at the hour of the rat. Attached to it is an astrologer's reading: this is a destiny noble and wealthy by nature; the character is extraordinary, the intelligence and refinement stand out, the man is humane and filial; anything he studies he will master in both letters and arms; there will be minor trouble in early childhood, which does no harm; from sixteen his luck opens and his body is sound; his wife will be the most capable and virtuous of women, his children numerous, and his lifespan long. Another version of the story has Kangxi himself writing five characters: "there is the air of a hero about him".

The paper was made public in 1929, when the Palace Museum's document office catalogued the Grand Secretariat archives. When it was written, Hongli was a prince's fourth son. Whoever wrote the reading did not know who the child was.

Which is where the popular story comes from: that Kangxi handed the empire to the boy's father because he liked the boy. "Choosing the son for the sake of the grandson."

Read that story carefully and it splits in two. The documented half: Kangxi did favour Hongli, did raise him at court, and near the end said repeatedly that the boy's fortune exceeded his own and that his fate was precious. The legendary half: the step from "he liked a grandson" to "so he chose a successor on the strength of a birth chart". Between those two stands an entire political calculation — the power of the other princes, the balance of the court, and the damage left by Kangxi's own two deposals and two reinstatements of an heir. How much weight a good chart carried in that decision is not something anyone can answer.

One thing is clear, though: Yongzheng knew about the chart. He kept astrologers at his own residence as a prince, and he knew his father took divination seriously. Handing up a son's excellent chart cost him nothing — in the best case, his father would look twice at the pair of them. This is the best-supported link in the story, and "best-supported" is as far as it goes.

Once he was on the throne, Yongzheng pushed the sealed-memorial system about as far as it would go: more officials than ever could send a private memorial straight to his hand, bypassing the Grand Secretariat. Birth data travelled down that channel. He asked casually, as if it were an afterthought.

In 1726 the governor-general of Yunnan and Guizhou, Ortai, fell ill. Yongzheng wrote on his greeting memorial: "How are you? Write out your birth data and send it to me casually." Ortai complied. Yongzheng's reply is the most quoted thing he ever wrote on the subject: "Because you are rarely ill, I wanted to look; it turns out to be the chart of a long life. My own heart ailment is cured."

In 1727 Li Wei, then in Zhejiang, was spitting blood from overwork. Yongzheng sent medicine, and then: "Write out your birth data casually and let me see it." Li Wei's reply is worth reading in full: "Your servant was born in the wuchen year, on the first day of the first month, at noon. Since the start of spring had not yet arrived, the pillars remain dingmao, guichou, yihai, renwu. I state this for the record."

That is the most charming sentence in the whole file. A provincial governor reporting his birth moment to the emperor also took care to flag the convention: he was born on the first day of the lunar year, but the solar term 立春 had not yet passed, so the year pillar still belongs to the previous year — the emperor should know. Even that had to be declared. The rule was in real use. The year pillar turns at the start of spring, not at lunar new year, and that is still true today.

Where military appointments were concerned, the practice stopped being merely solicitous. In 1728 Yue Zhongqi, governor-general of Sichuan and Shaanxi, was instructed to send the birth data of his senior officers. Yongzheng noted four characters on the memorial: "the charts are recorded and retained." Then he read through them one by one and wrote:

"Wang Gang's chart looks good. Feng Yunzhong I have looked at — quite unsuitable; his luck appears to be past, he can only hold position. Yuan Jiyin is also unsuitable; watch his lifespan. Zhang Yuanzuo is on a strong ascending cycle; all is favourable. The colonel Wang Tingrui and the lieutenant-colonel Chen Bi — these two have strong and favourable fates; if there is action, these two can be sent in." Yongzheng's vermilion endorsement, on a memorial by Yue Zhongqi

Whose luck is spent, whose lifespan is a worry, who is ascending and can be deployed — this is not idle talk. Of the same officer he wrote elsewhere: his fate is good, his luck is at its height, everything he does is favourable, he may reach the rank of provincial commander; but his lifespan is unlikely to be long. From these endorsements, researchers have reconstructed the grades he pencilled next to names on the lists of officials presented to him — upper-middle, lower-lower and the like — as a rough register for later appointments.

In the same batch of memorials sits one more sentence. He told Yue Zhongqi to keep going: "The principle of fate is subtle, but it cannot be entirely disbelieved either."

Look at the shape of that sentence. The other half of "cannot be entirely disbelieved" is "cannot be entirely believed". So Yongzheng, quite clear-eyed, did not treat fate-calculation as a verdict on appointment and dismissal — it was an auxiliary reference that ought not to be ignored.

What shows his position better than any private endorsement is a public edict.

On the first day of the first month of 1735, new year's day coincided with the start of spring. Read out in the sexagenary cycle, the moment came to 甲寅 year, 丙寅 month, 戊寅 day, 甲寅 hour — a repeat of the same stem four times over — and it snowed all day. The court took this as an excellent omen and offered congratulations. Yongzheng's answer is recorded in the Veritable Records of the Yongzheng reign, chapter 139, and reprinted in the imperial instructions:

I have never spoken of auspicious signs, and I have said so again and again... An auspicious sign is only a sign. It is the first hint of good fortune, and whether it comes true depends entirely on human effort... If, because a good sign has appeared, a man does not examine himself more carefully but instead lets himself go, then the bad sign lies within a single turn of the mind. On what, then, can the good sign be relied? Veritable Records of the Yongzheng Reign, ch. 139

This is the key to the whole affair. A sign is only a first hint. Whether it lands is a matter of human effort. Have a good sign, skip the self-examination, and let yourself go — and the good sign turns into a bad one in a single turn of the mind. In modern terms: the chart sets the starting point, the person is the variable. And this is not later writers being generous on his behalf. He issued the same argument more than once.

He then applied it directly to the relationship between ruler and minister. In the same edict he continues: suppose I find a man usable and promise him favour; the moment he hears it he lets himself go and abandons his previous conduct — then I have no choice but to withdraw the order and punish him instead. Even an emperor's favour is a sign a man can lose by his own behaviour.

There is a quieter line in the same passage, no less clear: good conduct brings down a hundred blessings; bad conduct brings down a hundred misfortunes. Fortune follows behaviour, not birth time.

So on the question of belief, the accurate version is this: he used it as a reference and knew where its authority ended. He demanded his ministers' birth charts and, in the same period, wrote in a public edict that auspicious signs are only signs and that the outcome lies with human effort. Both are true at once, and there is no contradiction — this is simply how a person uses something they treat as a reference.

Go back to "my own heart ailment is cured". That sentence deserves a second reading.

He did not want Ortai's chart in order to judge whether Ortai was usable — he had already used him, more heavily than anyone. He wanted a definite answer, to settle his own anxiety. The Yongzheng reign was turbulent, and the collapse of a capable minister was a real loss and a real worry. The Li Wei episode is the same shape: medicine first, then the chart. What he wanted was not knowledge. It was reassurance.

This is the layer of fortune-telling tools that gets noticed least and discussed least: it supplies an emotional anchor you can call on again and again. Calming someone down and being accurate are two entirely separable things. People have long used fortune-telling as emotional comfort, and it does genuinely help — but only while the boundary holds. Read the comfort as a guarantee, and the usual result is loud complaints that it was wrong, and bitter disappointment.

In 1724, Nian Gengyao’s eldest son, Nian Xi, was critically ill. Yongzheng read in Nian Gengyao’s chart a running period that "overcomes the eldest son", and on his own initiative arranged for the boy to be adopted by his own uncle, Longkodo, and renamed Dezhu — "obtained and kept". He then informed Nian Gengyao, away on campaign in Qinghai, that "this son no longer has anything to do with you". The boy died not long afterwards. Yongzheng himself sent down a decree to comfort Nian Gengyao, fearing the man would grieve himself ill over the loss of his son, and urged him patiently to take heart. Perhaps Yongzheng also felt that the adoption had been a case of treating a dying horse as one still alive — the comfort of a man who knew what heaven had decreed, yet still did everything humanly possible.

An emperor who reads charts will be sent charts, and once enough people are sending them, some will start editing.

On a sealed memorial from Fei Jinwu, the provincial administration commissioner of Shandong, there is a yellow slip with Yongzheng's own hand on it: "Write out your real birth data and send it in casually for me to look at. Do not fabricate it! You Han scholar-officials have this habit in numbers. Are you deceiving me? You are deceiving yourselves."

Three moves in three sentences. Write out your real birth data, do not fabricate it — he puts the existence of forged charts on the table, unasked. You Han scholar-officials have this habit in numbers — he knows it is a general practice, not the fault of one or two men. And the last line is the sharp one: "Are you deceiving me? You are deceiving yourselves." Forge a fine chart to fool me, and the person you fool is you.

The line gives him away. He understood perfectly well that a false chart buys no real promotion. What he wanted was the rough shape, not the four characters themselves. The same batch of memorials carries a finer instruction: when he sent Yue Zhongqi to collect the officers' birth data, he added that it should be asked for casually and the man should not be allowed to learn the emperor's intent.

The other side of the fashion is no prettier. Miao Yuan, an investigating censor, sent in a memorial explaining that his fate this year was obstructed: after the eighteenth day of the fifth month a baleful star had entered his fate palace and was working against him, and he asked not to be given any literary assignments — once the bad year had passed he would work hard in return. Using a horoscope to get out of a job.

Put those two cases side by side and the conclusion has nothing to do with accuracy. Any instrument endorsed by the highest authority will be gamed by the people beneath it. The more seriously the emperor takes it, the more people game it; the more people game it, the less reliable his data becomes. It is a self-polluting loop, and it afflicts every metric ever used to assess people — this one simply wears a costume that says "ordained".

In the eighth month of 1735 Yongzheng died at the Yuanmingyuan. The throne passed to Hongli — the owner of that birth chart.

Qianlong made his position plain within three days. He expelled the Daoist priests his father had kept at court and stated in an edict that the late emperor had merely heard reports of alchemical practice in the provinces and "wanted to watch the technique as a pastime, a diversion", never listening to their advice or taking their medicines (Veritable Records of the Qianlong reign). Within a month he forbade the reporting of auspicious signs. In 1739 he commissioned the imperially authorised Compendium on the Calculation of Auspicious Days, thirty-six chapters under Prince Zhuang, to bring the disorderly day-selection and divination literature of the marketplace under official standardisation.

As for requiring ministers to report birth data privately and grading them by hand — that disappears from the ordinary run of sealed memorials. Be precise here: no statute repealed it. It was never written into the collected regulations of the dynasty in the first place. It was one emperor's habit, and habits travel with the man. Once he was gone, it simply stopped.

Qianlong could sweep it away so easily because his opening policy was itself a correction of his father's. The early nineteenth-century chronicler Zhao Lian recorded the mood of that moment: on taking the throne following the severity of the previous reign, the emperor governed with leniency. Compared with expelling the Daoists, banning auspicious reports and halting the harshest debt-collection campaigns, "grading officials by birth chart" was the easiest item to drop.

There is also a quieter reason. Qianlong was not indifferent to fate either. He never denied the reading of his own chart — that this destiny was wealthy and noble by nature — he simply kept silent about it, and later referred to it only obliquely, as "his fate being precious". The difference is this: Yongzheng used the instrument on other people. Qianlong used it only on his own story.

Did Yongzheng really decide appointments from birth charts?

There are endorsements in his own hand. In 1728 Yue Zhongqi sent in the charts of four officers; Yongzheng marked them one by one — luck already past, only fit to hold position; watch his lifespan; on a strong ascending cycle, everything favourable — and named who could be sent into action. Researchers have also reconstructed the grades he pencilled onto lists of officials. But in the same batch of memorials he wrote that fate "cannot be entirely disbelieved either". A reference, not a verdict.

So did Yongzheng believe in fortune-telling or not?

There is evidence on both sides. Privately he collected his ministers' charts one by one. Publicly he said, repeatedly, that he never spoke of auspicious signs, and placed the outcome of a sign with human effort. "Believe or not" is the wrong question. He used it as a reference, and he knew where its jurisdiction ended.

What exactly did Qianlong abolish?

Not a law — a habit. He expelled the court Daoists, banned reports of auspicious signs, and in 1739 commissioned the official compendium that brought divination literature under state standardisation. The practice of ordering ministers to report birth data for the emperor to grade by hand disappears from the ordinary run of sealed memorials. It had never been written into the dynasty's regulations; it lived only in vermilion endorsements, and it stopped when the man did.

Treating the officer-killer as reference rather than prophecy — what shows up on your chart takes one question to see. These are ready to paste:

Ask Baize these first — ready to paste:

• If I treat it as reference and not prophecy, what does my chart show?
• Is there a kind of person around me I relate to by trust rather than by use?

It answers from your chart, not from a generic FAQ.

For how to use your strengths rather than when something is bound to happen, the Talent & Career Blueprint reads your strengths and rhythm; the benefactor reading shows who the real ones are, how to get close, and how to keep the connection.

First time on Baize and not sure which step comes first? The full order — chart, question, review, coming back — is in First Time on Baize: Where to Start.

This page is for cultural study and self-reflection. It is not a predictive promise, nor medical, legal, investment or career advice.