This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A Zi Wei palace entry records one of the twelve houses of a Zi Wei Dou Shu natal chart, each governing a distinct area of a person's life, career, health, siblings and the rest, into which the system's fourteen major stars enter according to a person's own birth data. This practitioner reference catalogues the fourteen stars' documented attributions in detail and, by the same structural logic, grounds how those stars come to occupy a chart's twelve palaces in the first place.
An entry records a palace's documented governing domain and its fixed position within the twelve house structure, since the palace system is the chart's own stable framework, distinct from the stars that move within it according to each individual's birth data.
Where a palace's documented meaning has been read somewhat differently across independent practitioner sources, an entry states that divergence honestly, following the same cross checking discipline the atlas applies to the fourteen stars themselves, marking genuine disagreement as debated rather than presenting one practitioner's reading as the system's single settled account. An entry also records, where the source specifies it, which palace is treated as a chart's own anchor for reading a person's overall fortune, since the twelve palaces are not weighted equally in every documented practitioner method the atlas draws on for cross checking.