Also called: Twelve palaces · Twelve houses of the hand · 十二宮 · Ming gong · Career palace · Wealth palace

Where on the hand: Twelve named zones distributed over the whole palm, mapped onto the trigram palaces: the Life palace at the centre, the Wealth palace under the index, the Career palace under the middle finger, the Marriage and Children palaces on the Apollo–Mercury side, the Servants palace at the start of the heart line, the Travel palace below the end of the head line, the Fortune and Property palaces at the base of the palm, the Siblings palace inside the life line, the Illness palace just above it, and the Parents palace at Lower Mars.

What it looks like: A second Chinese addressing system laid over the palm, borrowed directly from the twelve houses of Chinese astrology, so that the hand is read like a birth chart.

Where the eight trigram palaces map the palm onto the compass, the twelve palaces map it onto the twelve houses of a horoscope. A palmist using this system reads a mark by asking which house it falls in — a star in the Career palace concerns office and rank, the same star in the Marriage palace concerns the spouse. It is the clearest example of the Chinese habit of reading the hand as a chart rather than as a set of independent lines.

Read with care: Sources vary in where they draw the boundaries and some merge the Property and Fortune palaces; treat the map as a working convention rather than a fixed grid.