Also known as: 交友宮
Friends and Subordinates Palace (also called Social Network Palace, 交友宮) shows the quality of acquaintance-level relationships, the loyalty of those who work under you, and how broad social networks shape opportunity.
Important for those whose careers depend on networks: sales, leadership, public service. Afflicted, this palace warns of disloyalty or harm from associates.
Older Doushu texts write this palace as nú pú (奴僕), bondservants, a name pointing straight at household servants and shop hands, one of the ordinary structures of the society that produced the system. The later names, jiāoyǒu (交友, friends) and yǒupú (友僕), did not overturn the old reading so much as follow the disappearance of the relationship it described. Nobody keeps servants now, but everyone has colleagues, reports, clients and loose acquaintances, so the centre of gravity shifted from command to contact.
Two habits send readings off course early. The first treats this as the palace of backstabbers and takes any malefic here as bad company; classical warnings attach to particular star combinations and transformations, so an afflicted palace has to resolve into one of those before it says anything definite. The second equates a well-placed palace with having many friends. What is being described is the texture of contact and not its volume: a bright palace under affliction is classically rendered in terms of constant socialising and very few people one can actually talk to.
The palace sits opposite the Siblings Palace (兄弟宮), and its triad draws in the Children Palace (子女宮) and the Parents Palace (父母宮). Siblings and Friends both cover peers; what separates them is closeness. One end holds blood ties and tight partnerships, the other the wide field of casual connection. Read as a single axis, the pair often shows whether someone pours their energy into a few deep bonds or spreads it across many shallow ones, and where the cost of that choice lands. Where no major star sits here, the standard method borrows the stars of the opposite Siblings Palace, which is usually taken to mean the social picture lacks a keynote of its own and takes its colour from elsewhere in the chart.
Three questions make the reading concrete. Does more flow toward the person from the group or away from them, which the direction of lu and ji speaks to. Is the connection deep or broad, where gentler stars such as Heavenly Same (天同) and Taiyin (太陰) suggest few and chosen, while Greedy Wolf (貪狼) and Honest Chastity (廉貞) suggest crowds and circulation. And does the group carry the person or drag on them, which the malefic stars and the answering Siblings Palace address. Strong and weak mean nothing until they resolve into questions of this kind.
Reading pú as today's staff, team, audience or customer base is a widespread modern extension, and a genuinely useful one for anyone who manages people. Others argue it stretches past the original setting, and would assign reports here, partners to Siblings, and superiors to Career or Parents. A third position treats the palace as the social environment someone moves through instead of any specific people in it. Three readings circulate side by side, and presenting them that way is more honest than picking one and calling it orthodox.
Set beside the Career Palace (官祿宮), this palace answers who actually moves the work along. The same profession can run on personal craft or on a network, and the relative weight of the two palaces is where that difference shows. Set beside the Travel Palace (遷移宮), the question becomes whether a person can rebuild support after leaving familiar ground. What the tradition watches is not how many contacts exist but whether they hold at the moment something is needed.
Both cover peers; the difference is distance. The Friends and Subordinates Palace covers the wider field: colleagues, acquaintances, reports, clients. The Siblings Palace traditionally means brothers, sisters and very close partners, high in density and deep in mutual obligation. The two sit directly opposite each other and are usually read together, since concentrating everything in a few deep bonds and spreading it thinly across many look quite different along that axis.
The name followed a change in society. Households and shops really did run on servants and hired hands, and this palace was where that relationship was read. Nothing of the kind exists now, but reports, colleagues, collaborators and loose ties do, so the name became jiaoyou or youpu. The point worth keeping in mind is that the old verses were composed in the old setting and need translating, not just transplanting.
Ji classically carries attachment, attrition and entanglement. Landing here, it is usually described as spending heavily on relationships, giving more than comes back, or finding certain connections hard to end cleanly. It describes a manner of relating, not an accusation against anyone. Reading ji directly as betrayal has no textual support and can easily produce unfair suspicion of specific people.
The tradition does hold that work depending on groups calls for closer attention here, since both income and working method run through other people. But a chart reads as a whole. Two people in the same management role may have the decisive factor in the Career Palace for one and the Travel Palace for the other. This palace supplies the tone of the interpersonal side; it does not settle professional outcomes by itself.