What is feng shui?

Feng shui treats a place as better or worse according to the movement of qi, a vital energy thought to flow through the land. A good site lets qi move freely but not too fast. Hills and water matter most. The classic ideal is a site sheltered by high ground to the north and open at the front, with water curving around it.

Practitioners consider when to build as well as where, and they use almanacs, charms and compasses along with their reading of the land.

Writers usually describe two broad approaches. The Form School reads the shape of mountains and rivers. The Compass School uses directions and formulas, including a person's birth year.

The main instrument is the luopan, a compass surrounded by rings that divide the horizon into trigrams and twenty-four directions, along with stems and branches for timing.

Two compass-style methods are widely known. Eight Mansions takes a person's birth year and sex and finds a birth palace, one of the eight trigrams. The palaces fall into an East group and a West group, and eight named positions are read out from the palace.

The annual flying stars are a calendar method. Nine numbered stars, from One White to Nine Purple, take the squares of the Luo Shu, a three-by-three number square in which every line adds up to fifteen. A different star stands at the center each year. Both methods rest on a cycle of 180 years made of three sixty-year rounds.

Practices like feng shui are hard to separate from older Chinese cosmology. The anthropologist Ole Bruun lists early terms for them, including kanyu (Heaven and Earth), xiangzhai (examining a dwelling) and dili (earth principles). Han tombs contain divining boards with a square earth plate and a round heaven disk. One such board from a second-century BCE tomb in Anhui carries the numbers of the Luo Shu.

The name most tied to the early history is Guo Pu (276 to 324), a writer and interpreter of omens of the Jin dynasty. The Book of Burial (葬書) goes under his name, and it is often said to be the first use of the words feng shui, in a passage about qi, wind and water. Bruun says the term became common during the Song dynasty (960 to 1279).

The Song is often taken as the period when the Compass School took shape, with new rings on the instrument and formulas based on birth date and sex. After the Song, feng shui became more of a private trade, and experts sold their services to the public. Divination for houses and temples came to be more orthodox than divination for graves.

House manuals multiplied. The Ming carpenter's manual Lu ban jing illustrates good and bad sites. The Yangzhai shishu (陽宅十書), reprinted in a Qing imperial encyclopedia, sets out the birth palace and the East and West groups. Its table of birth years starts at the year 1504. In the Qing, the court's date-selection handbook, the Xieji bianfang shu of about 1741, describes the formula used by house diviners.

After 1949, the People's Republic labeled feng shui a feudal superstition. It remained popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and a wave of interest in mainland China during the 1990s was described as "fengshui fever."

The Book of Burial may not be by Guo Pu. Qing editors of the imperial catalogue noted that it first appears in the Song bibliography, and they treated the attribution as unsupported.

Sources disagree on the compass. A museum account says a compass was invented in the Han and used for navigation only in the Song. Others say it has served feng shui from the start. Reports of Neolithic graves and doorways aligned to the sky show an old interest in orientation, and they do not show that feng shui existed then. Accounts also differ on when the two schools formed, from the early Han to the Song.

The Yangzhai shishu is credited in some references to a Ming writer, Wang Junrong. We could not read a source that confirms this, and we give no firm date for its composition. Modern writing also often divides the 180 years into twenty-year periods. We did not find that division in the older sources we read for this page.

Scientists and philosophers generally class feng shui as non-scientific. The claims it makes about wealth, health and luck are claims of the tradition, and these pages report them as such.