Zi Wei leads the first of the two star series that structure the whole system of fourteen major stars: Zi Wei itself, Tian Ji, Tai Yang, Wu Qu, Tian Tong and Lian Zhen form the Zi Wei series, six stars whose palace positions in a birth chart are not calculated independently of one another but fixed as a group once Zi Wei's own palace is known, a lookup structure rather than six separate placements.
The companion series, led by Tian Fu, covers the remaining eight major stars by the same logic, so that finding Zi Wei's position for a given birth date and hour is the single calculation that, together with Tian Fu's own separately calculated position, seeds the whole natal chart before any of the twelve palaces can be read.
Zi Wei Dou Shu is traditionally attributed to Chen Tuan, a Taoist scholar and hermit of the late Tang into early Song period, roughly the ninth into the tenth century, an attribution the tradition's own literature repeats consistently, though the surviving classic texts that set out the system in the form practitioners use today, the Zi Wei Dou Shu Quan Shu chief among them, are compilations from centuries later, and Ho Peng Yoke's scholarship treats the attribution to Chen Tuan as a traditional ascription honoured within the practice rather than a settled fact of authorship modern textual history can confirm.