What are Flying Stars? The annual Feng Shui map that tells you which room to use

By Indre Vallorani · 7 May 2026 · 4 min read

In the autumn of 2022, Sofia moved into a larger flat. She had always slept in a north-facing room. The new flat had a better bedroom — more light, more space — and it faced south-west. She made the move. Within six months she was waking at 3am, catching every cold that came through her office, and visiting her GP for the first time in years. She changed her mattress. She bought blackout curtains. Nothing worked. Then a friend mentioned Flying Stars. Sofia looked up which star was visiting the south-west sector of her home that year. It was the number two star — the star of illness. She moved back to the north-facing room. The sleep problems stopped in under a month.

She will tell you she does not know if it was the Feng Shui. But she kept the north-facing room.

What are Flying Stars?

The full name is Xuan Kong Fei Xing (玄空飛星) — literally, "Stelle Volanti dello Spazio Vuoto" in Italian, or Flying Stars of the Empty Space. It is a branch of Feng Shui that treats your home not as a static object but as a field of energy that changes every year.

The foundation is the Lo Shu square — a 3×3 grid containing the numbers 1 to 9. This grid has appeared in Chinese mathematics and philosophy for over four thousand years. It is remarkable: every row, column and diagonal in the grid sums to exactly 15. Chinese masters interpreted it as a map of how energy moves through space — nine sectors, nine types of energy, rotating in a fixed pattern.

In Flying Stars, those nine numbers are not fixed. They move. Every year — beginning on 4 February, the true start of the Chinese solar year — the numbers shift position across the grid. Each number carries a specific quality. When a number moves into the sector of your home that corresponds to your bedroom, your front door, your home office, the energy of that sector changes with it.

The nine stars and what they carry

Five of the nine stars are auspicious. Four require caution.

The auspicious five: Star 1 brings water energy — good for career, clarity, intellectual work. Star 4 is the romance and creativity star — it supports writing, artistic projects, and new relationships. Star 6 carries celestial authority — helpful for mentors, recognition, and support from people in positions of power. Star 8 is the wealth star — the most powerful star for financial matters. Star 9 is the star of future prosperity and fire energy — it multiplies whatever it touches, for better or worse.

The inauspicious three: Star 2 carries illness energy — it affects the body, especially in bedrooms and kitchens. Star 3 brings conflict and arguments — it makes relationships fractious when it sits in shared spaces. Star 5 is the most dangerous star in the system. It carries misfortune, accidents and serious setbacks. When Star 5 lands in your main entrance or in a sector you use heavily, classical masters are unambiguous: do not disturb it. No renovations, no loud activity, no drilling in that sector. You activate it at your risk.

Period 9 — the era we are living in now

Flying Stars also operates on a longer cycle. Time is divided into Periods of twenty years, each ruled by one of the nine stars. We entered Period 9 in 2024, and it runs until 2043. The ruler of this period is Star 9 — fire, visibility, future-orientation, technology, and women in leadership.

In Period 9, Star 9 is at its absolute peak. Properties built or renovated with Period 9 energy, rooms that capture Star 9 in active sectors, people whose personal charts align with fire — all of these are supported by the era we are in. Star 8, which dominated the previous twenty years and made wealth so visible in Asian real estate markets, still works — but it is no longer at its apex. The energy of the moment is shifting toward what comes next.

In Hong Kong and Singapore, architects who specialise in high-value residential work have known this since 2024. The orientation of a main entrance, the placement of the master bedroom, the decision about where to put the home office — all of it is mapped against the Flying Stars chart of the current period before a single wall goes up.

How to apply this to your home

The practice is concrete. You take a compass bearing of your home — standing at the centre, facing the front door — and divide your floor plan into nine sectors matching the nine directions: North, North-East, East, South-East, South, South-West, West, North-West, and Centre. Each sector corresponds to a position in the Lo Shu grid.

Then you look up which star is visiting each sector this year. The star visiting your bedroom tells you what kind of energy you are sleeping in. The star at your front door tells you what energy enters your home. The star in your home office tells you what supports or drains your work.

Where you find an auspicious star — 1, 4, 6, 8 or 9 — you activate it: spend time there, use the room, add a light or a water feature. Where you find Star 2, Star 3 or Star 5, you subdue it: use the room less, keep it quiet, and in the case of Star 5, place traditional metal remedies — a string of six coins, a metal bowl with coarse salt — to suppress its influence.

The full guide — and your chart for this year

The full calculation — how the Lo Shu rotates year by year, what each star means in each specific sector of your home, how to handle the five inauspicious stars with classical remedies, and what Period 9 changes for the next twenty years — I wrote the complete guide on Medium.

And because the star positions change every year, the Sanctuary app calculates the current annual chart for you, mapped to your compass sectors. You do not need to do the arithmetic. You need to do the observation.

Read the complete Flying Stars guide on Medium →

Indre Vallorani Founder, Sanctuary · Certified Perfumer · Chinese Metaphysics
www.vallorani.uk