Wong Tai Sin lot 74 of 100
Zhu Maichen and his wife part
Lowest (下下). Grade as given on the named web transcriptions. We have not seen it on a temple printing, and we do not know that the temple prints one.
回憶當年運蹇時
夫妻反目兩分離
名題雁塔歸來後
覆水馬頭時否悲
I think back to the years when his luck was bad.
Husband and wife turned against each other and parted.
After his name was written on the Wild Goose Pagoda and he came back,
spilled water at the horse's head is a sorrow of hard times.
What this lot says
Success arrives too late to repair a marriage that failed in hard times. The spilled water is the common image for something that cannot be taken back.
It is graded lowest. As a prompt, it asks what you may be giving up under pressure that you cannot get back later.
A lot is a prompt for reflection. It cannot promise a result, and it is no substitute for medical, legal or financial advice.
The story behind it
Zhu Maichen and his wife part (朱買臣分妻)
A traditional allusion named with this lot. We have not traced the story to a source we could read, so we do not retell it here.
Where this text comes from
This verse is a traditional temple text with no known author, here read from named web transcriptions. We compared the sites character by character and show every difference. We could not establish whether the sites are independent of one another, and we have not read a temple printing.
Fortune Sticks (fortunesticks.org) (the text shown above)
回憶當年運蹇時 / 夫妻反目兩分離 / 名題雁塔歸來後 / 覆水馬頭時否悲
Retrieved 2026-11-09
Luckeyes (算命眼, luckeyes.com)
回憶當年運蹇時 / 夫妻反目兩分離 / 名題雁塔歸來後 / 復水馬頭時否悲
Retrieved 2026-11-09
Andy.hk (加賀風水)
回憶當年運蹇時 / 夫妻反目兩分離 / 名題雁塔歸來後 / 覆水馬頭時否悲
Retrieved 2026-11-09
Where the sources differ
- Line 4, character 1: fortunesticks.org and andy.hk read 覆; luckeyes.com reads 復. This is a different character.
English translation and commentary are by Cast & Chart.