Of all Twelve Palaces, the Wealth Palace is the celebrity. It lives on the nose — precisely, the tip and the two wings. The manuals call the nose the 'treasury star': the tip gathers, and the wings stand as a pair of vault doors, one taking in, one holding fast. The folk saying that a good nose means good fortune with money traces straight back to this palace.
Locating and measuring it
The palace's territory is concrete: the lower bridge, the tip, both wings, ending at the nose base. The modern handle is a ratio, not a size — the widest span of the nose wings divided by the face's width across the cheekbones. Being a ratio, it survives any uniform zoom of the camera; but it has one famous trap. Close-range selfies suffer perspective distortion that inflates apparent nose width by roughly a third — so this palace, above all, demands a frontal photo taken at arm's length or farther.
What the tradition says
What the manuals read here is a person's weather with money: boldness in earning, steadiness in keeping, openness of hand in spending. The crucial register is style, never amount — full wings versus refined wings describe different ways of taking wealth, not a forecast of how much. The ancients said it themselves: a fine nose still needs the other palaces to answer it. Judging riches from a nose alone is exactly the reading the classics reject.
What modern measurement looks at
- Full, spread wings — generous relative to cheekbone width. Read as enterprise and nerve: sees an opening and dares to stake, spends with an open hand, moves money fast, earns along pioneering routes.
- Moderate wings — width in measure. Read as disciplined flow: income and outgo both metered, spending where due and saving where due — the steady road.
- Refined, narrow wings — the fine-cut type. Read as quality over volume: protective of reputation, wary of money it cannot see through, best served by deep expertise — craft as capital, rather than a sprawling operation.
Beyond the nose, a report checks two cross-palace patterns. The 'field-character face': a squarish outline with an open jaw and unpinched forehead corners — steady as the Chinese character for 'field', traditionally read as methodical saving, wealth that stays in the vault. And 'nose answered by jaw' (treasury and vault standing guard): fleshy wings over a supporting jaw and a solid lower zone — star and storehouse matched, read as earning with channels and keeping with a strongroom. Both patterns require several metrics landing together.
In daily life: the full-wing type sizes up a deal by how big the table can get; the narrow-wing type asks first whether the deal is clean and worth signing one's name to; the moderate type nods only after the numbers balance. Each style has its winning ground and its blind side — the bold must watch impulse, the fastidious must watch missed boats, the steady must watch excess caution.
The right way to use this palace, then, is as a mirror of your default money game: know it, then choose where to follow your grain and where to deliberately compensate. Wealth itself is always the joint work of method, timing and effort — never something a nose could write in advance.