Drawings · 305 figures

The tradition, drawn.

Every plan, section and sheet on the site, in the order of the articles they belong to. One notation throughout: walls in ink, furniture in soft grey, the recommended position solid and the alternative ghosted, the red mark for north and for the thing that matters. Tap any drawing to enlarge it.

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What is feng shui? 3 drawings

Fig. 01 One shape at three scales. A: the classical site, a valley with a hill behind, ridges at the sides and water in front. B: the plot, with a hedge behind, planting at the sides and open ground before the door. C: the room, with a wall behind the bed, the floor open before it and the door in view. Everything on this site is a version of this drawing. The animals of the Form School name the four sides: the tortoise behind, the dragon and tiger at the sides, the bird in front. Left and right are the site’s own as it looks out, so the dragon is on the right of a north-up drawing of a south-facing site.

1The landform: what is behind the site, at its sides, in front; where the water comes from and goes
2The approach: how the road arrives, what it points at, where it stops
3The door: what it faces, what is seen first from it, where its line runs
4The rooms, in order of weight: the bed, the desk, the main seat; behind each, before each, in line with each
5The compass, last: the facing taken at the door, the sectors laid on the plan, the tables opened

Plan 02 A reading, as a walk A reading is a walk with a set of questions, and the questions come in an order, which is the tradition’s and the site’s. The practitioner begins on the hill behind the site, or on the road with a view of it, and reads the landform: what is behind, what is at the sides, what lies in front, where the water comes from and where it goes. Then the approach, walking it as a visitor would: how the road arrives, what it points at, where it stops. Then the door, standing in it and looking both ways: what it faces, what is seen first from it, where its line runs through the house. Then the rooms, in the order of their weight to the household, the bed, the desk and the main seat, and for each what is behind it, what it sees and what is in its line. And only then, at the door again, the compass: the facing taken, the sectors laid over the plan, the tables consulted. Feuchtwang timed a practitioner in Taiwan at most of a day on the first four stations and a few minutes on the fifth; the Dili Wujue, the manual that gave the compass school its method, lists the compass last of its five essentials. The order is kept on every page of this site because the first four stations can be checked with the reader’s own eyes.

Fig. 03 One living room, read three ways. A: the Form reading, the oldest: the main seat has the wall behind it, open floor in front and the door in view, and the light comes from the side. B: the Compass reading: the room divided into eight sectors from its centre, the facing taken at the door; what each sector means depends on the bearing, the year and the method, and the furniture does not come into it. C: the reading a designer makes without the vocabulary: where the light falls, the path from the door, the line of sight from the seat. Everything on this site is one of these three, and it says which. The three agree more often than their vocabularies suggest: the seat the Form School commands is the seat a designer gives the view, and the sector a Compass method favours is often the one with the window. Where they disagree the site says so, and gives the Form reading and the research the last word.

Understanding the Bagua 4 drawings

Fig. 01 The eight trigrams in the Earlier Heaven sequence, Qian to Kun, as Shao Yong set them out in the eleventh century and as Leibniz read them in 1703. Take a whole line as one and a broken line as nought, read each figure from the bottom, and the sequence counts down from seven to nought in binary. Leibniz, who had just worked out binary arithmetic, was sent the diagram from Beijing by the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet and recognised his own system in it. The sequence is a counting order, which is why the Earlier Heaven ring, the same sequence bent into a circle, pairs opposites across its centre and describes a world in balance rather than in motion. The Later Heaven ring, the one feng shui uses, is on the sheet below. The lines are read from the bottom up in every tradition; which end is the more significant digit is a choice, and reading the other way gives the same sequence counted in the other direction. The images are the Shuogua’s, the commentary on the trigrams appended to the Yijing.

Fig. 02 The eight trigrams on one sheet, drawn from their lines. A whole line is yang and a broken one yin; each figure is read from the bottom up, and the bottom line is the one that sits toward the centre of a luopan. Heaven and earth are the pure figures; the six between are the mixed ones, in the pairs the tradition gives them: thunder and wind, water and fire, mountain and lake. Under each, its direction in the Later Heaven arrangement, its element, and its place in the family of eight. The directions are the ones the site uses everywhere: Kan north, Li south, Zhen east, Dui west. The family is the Yijing’s and is what Eight Mansions turns into the two groups. The pictures are mnemonics the tradition itself uses: Kan is a current between two banks, Li a flame with a dark heart, Gen a ridge over hollow ground.

Fig. 03 The two rings, drawn with north at the top as every plan on this site is, which turns the classical diagrams upside down: the old woodcuts put south at the top, since the emperor faced south and the map was drawn from his chair. The Earlier Heaven ring, attributed to Fu Xi and drawn in the Song, pairs each trigram with its opposite across the centre, heaven against earth, fire against water, thunder against wind, mountain against lake, and every pair adds up to six lines of which three are whole and three broken: the world in balance, before anything has happened. The Later Heaven ring, attributed to King Wen and given in the Shuogua, puts fire in the south and water in the north, thunder in the east where the year begins and the mountain in the north-east where it ends, and it is the one on every bagua map, every luopan and every page of this site. A bagua mirror over a door carries the Earlier Heaven ring, since the mirror is meant to hold the world still; a plan carries the Later Heaven ring, since a house is lived in through the year. The Shuogua for the Later Heaven order; Smith 2008 for the Song diagrams and Shao Yong; Skinner 2008 for which ring sits on which instrument. Each trigram is read from the bottom up, and the bottom line is the one toward the centre.

Fig.The bagua as a nine-sector plan, north up, with Lo Shu numbers. Each cell carries its trigram, its element and the life area assigned to it in the Western bagua.

The Five Elements 4 drawings

Fig. Round the ring, each element produces the next: Wood feeds Fire, Fire makes Earth, Earth yields Metal, Metal condenses Water, Water nourishes Wood. Across the star, each restrains the one two steps on.

Fig. 01 The five phases as the Form School sees them in hills. A tall hill that rises to a narrow top is Wood; a pointed peak is Fire; a flat-topped, square-shouldered hill is Earth; a rounded dome is Metal; a low, irregular ridge with many crests is Water. The classification is the Han Long Jing’s and every later treatise repeats it, and it is the origin of the shapes the vocabulary gives to furniture and rooms: the tall bookcase that is Wood, the pointed roof that is Fire, the low square table that is Earth, the arch that is Metal, the wavy line that is Water. The shapes are read for what they do to a site: a Fire peak behind a house is a threat, a Metal dome is shelter, an Earth table is the ideal hill in front. Indoors the same eye reads a room’s furniture by outline, which is the practical content of the phases and the reason a designer can use them without the cosmology.

Fig. 02 The five phases on one sheet. Each column is a phase: the shape the tradition gives it, three steps of its colour, and the motion, the materials, the directions and the season assigned to it. The columns are the site’s five element colours, which are used everywhere a phase is named. A reference, not a rule. A room is rarely one phase; the sheet says what a room is made of when it leans one way, and what to add when the cycle on this page says it is short of another.

Fig. 03 The two rooms the essay reads, with the count under each. On the left the flat as the agent left it: a white sofa, a glass table, a grey floor, spotlights and a chrome lamp, which is Metal five times over with Water in the glass and the reflections, and nothing else at all — no Earth to stand on, no Wood to rise, no Fire to warm. The three additions are chosen by the cycles, not by taste: Fire melts Metal, so a warm lamp and one red thing; Earth gives weight, so a heavy rug and a wooden table; Wood lifts, so one tall plant. On the right the opposite flat, an old parlour of brown carpet, brown furniture and heavy curtains, which is Earth and Wood and feels stuck: Wood controls Earth, so one tall column of shelves; Metal gives edge and light, so a mirror, a white wall and a hard-shaded lamp; and the curtains opened, which is Fire. The strip is the whole method: five cells, filled where the room holds the phase and an open ring where it does not, and the absences are what the reading is for. Neither list of three says anything a good decorator would not have said. The system says it in an order, and gives a reason to stop at three. The low ceiling of the second room and the height of its surfaces cannot be drawn in plan and are in the essay instead.

A history of feng shui 3 drawings

Fig. 01The discipline in outline. Dates for the earliest layer are conventional; the attribution of the Zangshu to Guo Pu is traditional rather than established.

Fig. 02 The masters the lineages name, on one line. Above it, the Form school’s descent: Guo Pu of the fourth century, to whom the Book of Burial was attributed long after his death; Yang Yunsong, the court official of the late Tang who is said to have carried the siting texts south when the capital fell and taught at Ganzhou in Jiangxi; and the masters of Ganzhou who followed him, Zeng Wenchan his disciple, Liao Yu and Lai Wenjun of the Song, the four whom the villages of the south still name and whose descendants sent out geomancers for a thousand years. Below it, the Compass school’s: Wang Ji of Fujian in the Song, credited with the instrument’s ascendancy; Jiang Dahong of the seventeenth century, to whom the San Yuan method and the Water Dragon Classic are attached; Zhang Zhongshan of the Qing, of the Xuan Kong line; and Shen Zhureng, whose notes his son published in 1927 as the book that made Flying Stars the method of the twentieth century. At the right, the practice entering English: Eitel’s book of 1873, and Lin Yun’s Black Sect written up by Rossbach in 1983. The dates of the early masters are the lineages’ own, and a lineage is a claim as much as a record. Bruun and Smith give the lineages as the practitioners tell them; Paton the texts each master is attached to; Skinner the Compass school’s succession. Where a date is a century, the sources give no better.

1The bed against a solid wall, the door in view, out of its line — a burial text of the fourth century, read indoors
2The head turned to a direction taken from the birth year — Bazhai Mingjing, a Qing compilation of older material
3The bearing the whole calculation rests on — the magnetised needle, described by Shen Kuo in 1088
4The mirror kept from facing the bed — twentieth-century practitioner manuals, not a classical rule
5The corner of the room called wealth — Black Sect, taught in the United States from 1983

Plan 03 One bedroom, and the five different centuries giving it orders Every rule marked here is really held by somebody, and no two of them come from the same place or the same century. Read as one voice they contradict each other, which is what the reader meets online; read as a sequence they simply belong to different practices, and the site's methodology page keeps them apart by naming the source of each. The room is drawn with north up and the door on the south wall; nothing in the drawing says which of the five to follow, because that is not a question the history answers.

The texts 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The texts, on one axis. Above the line, the Chinese classics and manuals, from the Zangshu to the Flying Star treatise of the 1920s; below it, the Western accounts and the modern books through which most readers now meet the tradition. The gap between the two rows is the gap between what the tradition wrote and what has been written about it. The axis is stretched after 1500 and again after 1850, where most of the texts are. Dates are approximate where the texts are: the Zangshu’s attribution to Guo Pu is recorded much later than his lifetime, and the Huangdi Zhaijing is older than its earliest surviving copy. The dot marks the century, not the year.

Fig. 02 Where the siting books sat in the imperial library. The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, compiled for the Qianlong emperor between 1773 and 1782, sorted every work it kept into four divisions: the Classics, the Histories, the Masters and the Collections. The Masters division held fourteen categories, among them the Confucians, the Legalists and medicine, and among them the numerical arts, which held seven kinds: astrology, the almanac, the theory of yin, yang and the five phases, divination, the books of fate and physiognomy, and, its own kind, the reading of houses and graves. That is the shelf the Zangshu, the Zhaijing, Yang Yunsong’s dragon classics and the Ming books on the yang house sat on, between the astrologers and the fortune-tellers, and the librarians’ notes on them are among the most sceptical things ever written about the practice by people who had read all of it. The catalogue’s notes on the numerical arts say that the arts are old, that their books are late, and that the compass school in particular had multiplied its rules past checking; Smith’s survey of the divinatory arts takes its map of the field from the same catalogue. The tree omits the categories on either side of the ones drawn.

Fig. 03 The texts by subject. Fifteen books against seven subjects: a red dot is what a book is about, a ring is what it touches. Down the columns: the graves and the landform belong to the oldest texts; the house has its own classics from the Tang and the Ming; the compass and the calendar are Qing and later; the rooms and their cures are on the newest books; and the accounts of the practice are all Western. Across the rows: no text covers the subject, and the ones that come closest are the modern manuals. The subjects are the site’s reading of what each text is for, not a table of contents. Skinner and Rossbach are separated here, as they are not on the axis above: the first describes the classical system, the second carried the Black Sect method and its cures into English.

Feng shui and religion 3 drawings

Fig. 01 Where the imperial librarians put feng shui. The Siku Quanshu, the library the Qianlong emperor’s scholars finished in 1782, sorted everything written in China into four branches: the Classics, the Histories, the Masters and the Collections. Feng shui went into the third, among the Masters, which is where the philosophers and the technicians were kept; and inside it, into the category of the numerical arts, the shushu, beside astrology, divination, the reading of faces and the yin-yang and five-phase writings; and inside that, onto the shelf for the siting of houses and graves, where the Book of Burial and the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of the Dwelling sit to this day. Three descents, and none of them into a canon of scripture: the Daoist and Buddhist canons were catalogued separately, and no geomantic text is in either. The editors added a judgement to the shelf, that the practice was old, its attributions doubtful and its effects unproved, which is the position this site takes two and a half centuries later. A reader who wants to know what the tradition is can read the librarians, who had all of it in front of them and shelved it with the calendar and the almanac. Siku Quanshu zongmu tiyao, 1782, the annotated catalogue of the imperial library; Smith 1991 for the diviners of the Qing and the market they shared. The categories and their Chinese names are the catalogue’s own; only seven of the Masters’ fourteen categories are drawn.

1The mountain behind · 2 The release-life pond before the gate · 3 The mountain gate
4Drum tower, west · 5 Bell tower, east · 6 The Great Hall on the axis · 7 The abbot at the back

Plan 02 A monastery, sited A Buddhist monastery of the kind Prip-Møller surveyed in the lower Yangtze in the 1930s, drawn as the Form School reads it. The mountain rises behind the compound to the north, the monastery’s back; the release-life pond lies before its gate to the south, dug for the rite of freeing fish and turtles and lying where the school wants water before a building. The halls stand in order on one axis from the mountain gate at the south, through the Hall of the Heavenly Kings, the Great Hall of the Buddha at the centre and the Dharma hall, to the abbot’s quarters and the library at the back against the hill, each hall facing south over its court; the drum tower stands to the west of the first court and the bell tower to the east, the two arms. A Daoist temple on its sacred mountain and a Confucian academy in its valley are sited by the same sentence, and the monks who built this one had a geomancer walk the ground before they cut a stone; the sentence belongs to none of the three teachings and served all of them.

Fig. 03 Feng shui’s standing with the authorities over two thousand years, on a line broken in two so that the last two centuries can be read at their own scale. Above the line, the state and the teachings that employed it: the Han court consulting its kanyu diviners on the date of a marriage, which the Shiji records; Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals of the 1180s telling the mourners to choose the grave by divination, the Confucian licence for the geomancer; the Ming tombs at Beijing sited by the court’s geomancers from 1409; the Qing Directorate of Astronomy keeping geomancers on its staff beside the calendar makers; the revival of the 1980s; and Hong Kong’s government paying, into this century, for the feng shui its roads disturbed. Below the line, the critics and the campaigns: the Siku Quanshu of 1782 filing the Book of Burial with the numerical arts, which was a judgement; the missionaries Yates, Eitel and de Groot, for whom the practice was the obstacle to the mission and then a curiosity; the Nationalist standards of 1928 that listed geomancy among the superstitions to be abolished; the Cultural Revolution, in which the compasses were burned and the masters silenced. The practice was never a church and was never free of the state. The dates are the sources’: the Shiji’s biography of the day-selectors, Ebrey’s translation of the Family Rituals, Bruun’s history for the tombs, the Directorate and the revival, Nedostup for 1928, Eitel and de Groot for themselves. The Hong Kong entry stands for a practice the territory’s government has kept since the 1970s.

The yin house 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The classical site, as the burial texts draw it. Behind the grave, the ancestor mountain and, nearer, the parent mountain; between them and the lair run the dragon veins, the ridges the Form School reads as the channels of qi. The lair is the spot where the veins come to rest, and the grave sits in it, drawn as the horseshoe mound of a southern Chinese tomb. Two arms reach forward from the parent mountain, the dragon on the site’s left as it looks out and the tiger on its right, and close the bright hall, the open ground in front. Beyond it a low table hill, and far off the facing mountain. The water enters from the dragon side, curves round the front of the site and leaves by the water mouth, the narrow gap between two hills at the lower right. Every term in this drawing is a burial term first: the Zangshu and the Han Long Jing are about this site, not about a house. The tradition’s transfer of the same drawing to the living, mountain behind and water in front, seat in the lair, door as the mouth, is the subject of the article. North is up and the site faces south, as the texts assume; the drawing is a diagram of relations, not a survey.

Fig. 02 The tomb as the mason builds it, with the four parts the valley would have supplied. The wall curving round the back of the burial is the tomb's own tortoise; the two wings reaching forward from its ends, stepped in tiers, are its own dragon and tiger, the dragon on the tomb's left as it looks out and so on the right of the drawing; the paved court between them, with the offering slab in it, is its own bright hall; and the stone that names the dead stands across the axis where the mound meets the court. The tomb faces down the slope, to the water or the open ground the site allows. The shape is what is constant, not the size: graves run from a mound a couple of paces across to the terraced tombs a lineage builds across a whole hillside, and the drawing is set at a modest family tomb, about seven metres from wing to wing. De Groot drew the Amoy version of this plan in 1897 and called it the omega, for its shape; Freedman describes the same tomb in Fujian and Guangdong, and Yoon the Korean mound and stone table that answer to it. The drawing is a diagram of relations, not a survey of any one grave.

Fig. 03 The water mouth, in the two readings the texts give it. A: two streams come down either side of the site, meet in front of it and leave through a narrow gap between two hills, the mouth; the water lingers, and the texts read the site as holding its qi. B, ghosted: one stream runs straight past the site and out across open ground; the water leaves as fast as it came, and the texts read the site as draining. The site itself, the lair and its arms, is the same in both. The mouth is the Form School’s test of a valley and one of the few of its rules that a modern eye reads the same way: a valley whose water leaves slowly is sheltered, watered and fertile, and a valley whose water runs straight out is a wind tunnel. The Zangshu’s sentence, that qi stops at water, is about this drawing.

The household gods 3 drawings

Plan 01 Where the household gods stand A flat of ten metres by six and a half with its front door in the south wall, kept as a southern Chinese household keeps its gods. The altar stands against the wall of honour, opposite the door and facing it, with the gods on its own left and the ancestors on its right, and the living room arranged round it as the hall was arranged round the wall of honour. The Kitchen God’s paper image is above the stove, facing out into the kitchen. The earth lord, the lord of the ground the flat stands on, has his small red shrine at floor level just inside the door, facing out, where the Cantonese keep it. The heaven shrine hangs on the post outside the door, the door gods are pasted on the leaves, and the bed mother, who guards the children, is honoured at the child’s bed in the room at the top left. Nothing faces the bathroom, nothing stands under a beam, and the altar’s back is to a solid wall that is not the bathroom’s.

Fig. 02 A household altar in elevation, as a southern Chinese home keeps it and as the practitioners measure it. The shelf stands at about a hundred and fifty centimetres, above the head of anyone seated before it and below the head of anyone standing, with the gods on its own left, which is the right as one faces it, and the ancestors’ tablet on its right, the dragon side for the deities and the tiger side for the dead, in the order the Book of Rites gives the eastern and western steps. A burner stands before each, a pair of red lamps flank the shelf and are kept lit, and the offering table at eighty centimetres carries the fruit and the tea. The earth lord, the lord of the ground the house stands on, has his own small shrine at floor level below or near the door, facing out. The one thing drawn that is not on the altar is the beam: the altar must not stand under one, nor with its back to a bathroom’s wall, nor facing a kitchen door or a lavatory, which is the site’s general rule for the bed and the desk applied to the gods. The heights are those the Hong Kong and Taiwanese practitioners give, and they vary by a hand from house to house; the order of gods and ancestors on the shelf does not. In a flat the altar is a cabinet on the same wall at the same height, and the earth lord’s shrine goes inside the front door.

Fig. 03 The Ding Lan ruler, the second scale printed on every carpenter’s tape sold in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the south, beside the Lu Ban scale the front door page gives. The Lu Ban scale is for the living and their doors; the Ding Lan scale is for the things of the gods and the dead, the altar shelf, the offering table, the tablet, the grave. It is 38.8 centimetres long in ten segments of 3.88, six of them auspicious, offspring, thriving, justice, office, rising and wealth, and four not, harm, bitterness, death and loss, and the scale repeats along the tape, so that a height is read by where its remainder falls. The four heights marked are the ones the altar page gives: a shelf at 150 centimetres falls in loss, which is why the tape-makers and the practitioners who use it move the shelf to 152, in wealth; the offering table at 80 falls in offspring, and a tablet of 36 falls in wealth, which is the height the makers cut them to. The segment names are the ones printed on the tapes; the readings are the makers’ and the practitioners’, not the site’s. Ruitenbeek 1993 for the Lu Ban jing and the carpenter’s measures; the Ding Lan scale is not in the fifteenth-century manual and is the later trade’s addition, named for a filial son of the Han. A shelf at 150 is a good shelf; the rule is given so that a reader knows what the practitioner is measuring.

The furniture of the tradition 3 drawings

Fig. 01 Six pieces of the classical house. A: the canopy bed of the Ming, a platform with a post at each corner, a frame above and railings below, hung with curtains that were drawn at night, so that the sleeper lay in a room within the room. B: the kang of the north, a brick platform heated by the kitchen’s flue, which ran beneath it to a chimney; the household sat, ate and slept on it through the winter. C: the folding screen, six or eight leaves on hinges, the tradition’s movable wall, drawn in elevation with its plan below; it divided a room, stopped a line of sight and turned a draught. D: the altar table, long, high and narrow with its upturned ends, against the wall of honour, and the square table set before it for the meal and the offering. E: the horseshoe chair, its back and arms one curved rail, the seat given to the guest of honour and the elder. F: the Eight Immortals table, a square for eight, two stools to a side, the family’s table for four centuries. The pieces are the ones the site’s room guides keep referring to, and the ones a reader of the classical manuals meets on every page. The forms are the hardwood pieces of the late Ming that Wang Shixiang catalogued and Handler described; the kang is the vernacular exception, brick and not wood, and is drawn in section. The site’s guides to the bedroom, the living room and the dining room say what each piece taught the rules.

Fig. 02 The wall of honour of a classical hall, in elevation, as the Ming and Qing houses kept it and the site’s living-room guide keeps referring to. At the centre a hanging scroll, a landscape or a calligraphy changed with the season, with a pair of couplets either side of it; beneath, against the wall, the altar table, long, high and narrow, with the incense burner at its centre and a vase at each end, the family’s altar on ordinary days and the ancestors’ on the festivals. Before it the square table, the Eight Immortals table, for the meal and the offering, and either side of that the two armchairs of the hall, the host’s on the east, which is the right as one faces the wall, and the guest of honour’s on the west, in the order the Book of Rites gives for the eastern and the western steps. Along the side walls the lesser chairs, in pairs with a small table between, for the rest of the company by rank. The arrangement is symmetrical about the scroll, the wall is the room’s north, and everything the tradition says about the seat with a wall behind it and the door in view was first said here. The heights are the classical pieces’: the altar table at about ninety centimetres, the square table at eighty, the seats at fifty, the scroll hung with its lower roller at eye level. Knapp’s survey gives the hall and its wall of honour region by region; Handler and Wang Shixiang give the pieces.

Fig. 03 The canopy bed, jiazichuang, drawn as what it was, a room inside the room. In plan, a platform of about two metres by two and a quarter stands against the chamber’s wall with railings on three sides and its fourth side open toward the room and its door; a step before it, a small shelf inside for the lamp and the cup, and curtains that were drawn along the open side at night. In section, the platform at about fifty centimetres, the four posts, the frame at two metres and the canopy, with the curtains hung inside the posts, so that the sleeper lay in a dark, warm box open on one side to a room they could see. The bedroom page’s rules are a description of the piece: the head against a wall, because the frame stood against one; the enclosure, because of the railings; the dark, because of the curtains; the door seen from the pillow, because the open side faced it. When the tradition says a bed should not lie under a window or in the door’s line, it is saying that a bed should be this, and the modern mattress on legs in the middle of a plastered box has lost everything the rule assumed. Wang Shixiang 1986 and Handler 2001 for the type and its sizes; Wen Zhenheng for the taste; Alexander 1977 for the bed alcove that arrives at the same piece from the other side.

The houses the manuals were written for 3 drawings

Fig. 01 Four houses the tradition was written for, drawn as ideas rather than to a common scale, north up in each. A: the Beijing courtyard house, the plan the yang-house manuals assume: a walled rectangle with its gate at the south-east corner and a screen wall inside it, a front court, an inner gate on the axis, a main court with the east and west wings, and the principal hall along the north facing south, the elders in the hall and the sons in the wings. B: the sky-well house of Huizhou and the lower Yangtze, tall and narrow between whitewashed walls, with a small open court at its centre, the sky-well, into which the four roofs drain, so that rain, which is wealth, is kept in the house, and the hall open to the court behind it. C: the earth building of Fujian, a ring of rooms three or four storeys high round a court with the ancestral hall at its centre and a single gate, usually to the south, a whole lineage in one fortified circle. D: the sunken courtyard of the loess plateau, a pit dug down eight or nine metres with the rooms cut as vaulted caves into its four walls and a ramp entering from the south, so that the earth is behind every room and the sun is in front of the ones that matter. Every one of them puts the hall to the north facing south, keeps its water, and enters from the south or the south-east. Knapp’s surveys of Chinese dwellings give the four with plans and photographs; Golany’s of the earth-sheltered houses gives the loess. The Form School’s sentence, back to the hill and face to the water, is built into all four, and the regional forms differ in how they get the sun and keep the rain.

Fig. 02 A sky-well house of Huizhou in section. The house is tall and narrow between two whitewashed walls that rise above the roofs in steps, the horse-head walls that stop a fire spreading from one house to the next along a lane. The roofs of the four sides slope inward, so that the rain from every one of them falls into the narrow open court at the centre, the sky-well, and is caught in a stone basin there before it drains away: the saying is that the four waters return to the hall, and in the merchant houses of the region, whose owners were away for years at a time, the rain kept was the wealth kept, in the tradition’s reading of water. The rooms stand two storeys deep either side of the well, and the hall, open to the court on its whole front, takes its light and its air from the well and its view of the sky from the same square. A house built for the summer heat, the winter rain and a lane too narrow for windows, and the yang-house rule of water in front of the hall built into its section. The section is typical of the Ming and Qing merchant houses of Huizhou, Wuyuan and the lower Yangtze; Knapp gives measured examples. The stone basin is the house’s bright hall in miniature.

Fig. 03 The plan the manuals assume, beside the plan the reader lives in. The numbered marks appear on both and are what the flat kept: a door; a place inside it to turn, which was a screen wall and is now a hall; the hall itself with the household’s seats and its pictures on the far wall, which is the living room; the rooms behind it by rank, which are the bedrooms; the kitchen at the side; and the court, which in a flat is the window and, if there is one, the balcony. The three red marks are on the courtyard alone. The first is the court itself, the open ground before the hall, and with it the bright hall, the water and the sky, which is the largest thing the move to a flat cost and the reason the room guides make so much of a balcony. The second and third are the parts of the plan that were the household’s structure rather than the house’s: the gate set in the south-east off the axis, and the wings allotted by generation with the ancestral hall behind. A reader who meets a rule in a manual should ask which of these it was written for. The ones written for the first six still apply; the ones written for the last three are about a household nobody now lives in. The courtyard house is drawn as the northern siheyuan the houses essay describes, simplified; the flat is a common three-room plan. North is up in both, and the courtyard house faces south, which is why its gate is at the bottom.

The shophouse 2 drawings

1The five-foot way: the arcade under the upper storey, a public path along the whole street
2The shop: open to the street by day, shuttered at night, the counter on the party wall
3The air well: the sky-well of the south, light and air to the middle of a deep lot, rain to a drain
4The hall: the altar on the back wall of the first court, the family’s rooms above by the stair
5The kitchen and the back court: the stove at the rear, the well or tap, the back lane for the night soil
6The party walls: shared with the neighbours on both sides, the lot lit only from its two ends and the well

Plan 01 The shophouse, in plan A shophouse lot of the Straits type, five metres wide and thirty deep, drawn with the street at the bottom and the back lane at the top. The five-foot way runs under the upper storey along the street, a covered public path the whole row shares, which the colonial regulations of Singapore required from 1822 and the tradition read as a hall of arrival for every shop at once. The shop stands behind it, open to the street by day and shuttered at night, with its counter on the party wall and the till, as the workplaces guide asks, seeing the door. Behind the shop the air well, the sky-well of the southern house, brings light and air to the middle of a lot that has neither from its sides, and takes the rain to a drain; the hall beyond it holds the altar on its back wall and the stair to the family’s rooms above. A second well and the kitchen follow, with the stove at the rear where the fire is farthest from the stock, and the back court opens to the lane that the night-soil carts used. The party walls on both sides are shared, so that the whole plan is a sequence of rooms and wells along one axis, which is the courtyard house of the north turned end-on and pressed between neighbours.

Fig. 02 The shophouse cut through along its length, street at the left. The upper storey jetties out over the five-foot way, so that the arcade is shaded by the family’s rooms; the shop stands behind it under those rooms, the deepest and darkest part of the lot. The air well is the section’s point: an opening in the roof the width of the lot, through which the rain falls into a drain and the light falls into the middle of a house that has no windows in its sides, and through which the warm air of the shop and the hall rises and draws the street’s air in under the shutters. The hall and its stair stand behind the well, the second well and the kitchen behind them, and the back lane closes the section. Read as the tradition reads a house, the shop is the entrance hall with a till in it, the first well is the bright hall, the hall behind it with the altar on its wall is the hall of honour, and the kitchen is at the back where the stove belongs; the plan is the courtyard house’s sequence stood on end. Read as an engineer reads it, the section is a stack ventilator, which is why the type was built from Guangzhou to Penang for two centuries and why the ones whose wells have been roofed over are the hot ones. The type is Knapp’s and Davison’s: the southern Chinese shophouse as it was built in the treaty ports and the Straits Settlements from the 1820s, with the five-foot way of Raffles’s 1822 ordinance. Dimensions typical, not surveyed.

Feng shui beyond China 3 drawings

Fig. 01 How the tradition travelled. From China it went with Chinese writing and Chinese statecraft to Korea, where it became pungsu and sited the capital; to Japan, where the capital of 794 was laid out to the four gods and the practice narrowed to the reading of houses and directions; and to Vietnam, where the last dynasty built its citadel to the Form School’s plan. In the twentieth century it went with emigrants to the cities of the diaspora, and from there, in English, to the West. The dashed arrow is a displacement rather than a spread: after 1949 the practice was suppressed on the mainland and continued in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, where most of the modern manuals were written. Dates are those of the best-known events, not of first contact.

Plan 02 The demon gate: the Japanese house and its closed corner A small house inside the ring of eight directions, north up. The Japanese house-reading, kasō, keeps the north-east, the demon gate, kimon, and its opposite the south-west, the rear demon gate, ura-kimon, clear of the entrance, the kitchen, the toilet and the bath; the axis between them is hatched and the four are placed off it, the entrance on the south-east, the kitchen on the east wall, the bath and the toilet on the north-west. The ghosted toilet in the north-east corner is the fault the manuals name first. The rule is Japanese, not Chinese: the Chinese schools read the north-east as Gen, the mountain, and have no closed corner, and the difference is the clearest mark of which country’s reading a plan has had.

Fig. 03 Four capitals on one plan. The model: something solid behind, lower ground at the flanks, water in front, the seat on the axis with its back to the mountain. Hanyang, the Joseon capital of 1394: Bugaksan behind the palace, Inwangsan and Naksan at the flanks, Namsan across the front and the Han river beyond it. Heian-kyō, laid out in 794 to the four gods: a hill to the north, the Kamo river to the east, the San’in road to the west, the Ogura pond to the south, and the palace at the head of the grid. Huế, begun in 1804: the citadel on the Perfume River, facing the hill of Ngự Bình, which stands before it as a screen. Schematic, north up, and not to scale: each map keeps the relations the histories describe and nothing else. Whether a site was chosen for these reasons or described in these terms afterwards is a question the scholarship takes seriously; either way the description shaped what was built.

Siting elsewhere 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The two practices the one word was made to cover. On the left the sand diviner's method, which Hugh of Santalla translated out of the Arabic in the 1140s and which every European court and country fair then practised for five hundred years: four rows of marks made without counting, each row counted odd or even afterwards, the four parities read down as one of sixteen figures. On the right the Chinese method: six casts of stalks or coins, each giving a whole or a broken line, the six read up as one of sixty-four hexagrams built on eight trigrams of three. The arithmetic is the same trick — a random count turned into a line — and that is the whole of the resemblance. What each did next is the difference, and it is why only one of them became a way of siting anything. The figure answered the question it was cast for and was thrown away; the trigram was laid over the compass, the plan, the body and the year and left there, which is what the bagua essay draws. The site keeps the misnomer because Eitel's book of 1873 fixed it and Needham kept it with a caveat, and the glossary carries the same caveat. The hexagram drawn here is the eleventh, three whole lines under three broken.

Fig. 02 The two square maps side by side, north up. Left, the vastu purusha mandala of India: a square across which the cosmic man lies face down with his head to the north-east, pinned there by the gods, and Brahma’s seat at the centre, left open in a house as the courtyard is; each direction has a deity and a use, water and prayer in the north-east, the sun and the entrance in the east, fire and the kitchen in the south-east, the heaviest walls and the master’s bedroom in the south-west, the wind and whatever moves, guests and stores, in the north-west, wealth and openness in the north. Right, the Later Heaven bagua as the yang-house manuals lay it over a plan: water in the north, fire in the south, the wind and the gate in the south-east, the mother and the earth in the south-west, the father and heaven in the north-west, and the hall facing south. The two agree on the south-west as the heavy, earthen corner and on the wind in the north-west; on fire and water they are a forty-five-degree turn apart, fire in the south-east and water in the north-east in India, fire in the south and water in the north in China. Two cosmologies, one plan, and the same house at the end of both: a walled square, open at the centre, heavy at the back, light at the front. The mandala’s deities and uses are the standard ones of the treatises, which Chakrabarti gives with their modern applications; the finer grid behind it is the nine-by-nine of the paramasayika mandala. The bagua’s uses are the courtyard house’s, which the houses essay walks.

Fig. 03 Rooms by their aspect in two traditions, on one ring, north up. On the outer ring, Vitruvius’s rule from the sixth book of On Architecture, written in Rome about twenty years before Christ: winter dining rooms and bathrooms face south-west, for the evening sun of the short days; bedrooms and libraries face east, for the morning light and to keep the books from the damp of the south wind; dining rooms for spring and autumn face east too, and those for summer face north with the painters’ studios and the galleries, for a light that does not change; the granaries and stores go where the sun does not. On the inner ring, the Chinese courtyard house as the manuals lay it: the hall along the north facing south with the elders and the altar, the east wing for the eldest son and the west for the second, the gate in the south-east where the summer wind comes in, and the back rooms in the north, sheltered. Rome read the sun by the room’s use and the season; China read it by the household’s rank and the year’s direction; both put the principal room on the sunny side and the stores on the dark one, and both wrote it down. Vitruvius’s aspects are from Book VI, chapter 4, in Morgan’s translation; the courtyard house’s from the houses essay. Rome’s bedroom faces east because Vitruvius liked to wake in the sun; the tradition’s faces where the wing puts it, which is east or west, and turns the bed within it.

The garden 3 drawings

1Gate in the corner, the view screened · 2 The false mountain across the water
3The hall facing south over the pond · 4 The pond, the water before the hall
5The covered walk, winding · 6 The pavilion over the water
7The moon gate into the east court · 8 The pagoda beyond the wall, borrowed

Plan 01 A scholar’s garden, read A garden of the Suzhou kind, forty metres by thirty inside its wall, drawn as the Form School would read it. The gate is in the south-east corner and a rock stands inside it, so that nothing of the garden is seen from the street and the visitor turns at once, which is the courtyard house’s screen and the Yuan Ye’s first instruction. The hall stands on the north side facing south over the pond, with the water before it as its bright hall; the false mountain of piled lake rock rises on the far side of the pond as the facing hill, with a path over it and a cave through it. The covered walk winds along the west wall so that the garden is crossed slowly and never in a straight line, and the pavilion stands out over the water on the south-west, the seat from which the whole is seen. A wall divides the east court from the rest and a moon gate is cut through it to frame the court’s tree. Beyond the north wall a pagoda stands on a hill outside the garden, and the pavilion is placed so that the pagoda is seen over the wall: borrowed scenery, the garden taking as its own what it does not own. Mountain behind, water in front, the approach turned, the view held: the sentence the tradition wrote for a grave and a house, made in a third of an acre for pleasure.

Fig. 02 Six devices of the garden as the Yuan Ye gives them, and each is a feng shui rule made pleasant. Suit the site: read the slope, the water and the views the ground already has and build with them, which is the Form School’s reading of a site said by a garden maker. Borrowed scenery: cut a gate or a window to frame what lies beyond the wall, a pagoda, a hill, a neighbour’s tree, so that the garden owns what it does not own; the moon gate is the instrument. The false mountain: a hill piled from lake rock or earth where the plan wants a mountain, with a path over it and a cave in it, the garden’s back hill and facing hill in one. The water: a pond before the hall with an island and a bridge, the bright hall made of water and something to cross it. The winding path: no line in a garden is straight, the bridge zigzags and the walk turns, so that the garden is crossed slowly, which is the courtyard’s screen stretched across a whole plot. The leak window: a lattice in a wall through which the next court is glimpsed and not seen, so that a small garden reads as part of a larger one. The six are the six things the tradition asks of a site, and the garden is where it asked them for pleasure rather than fortune. The terms are the Yuan Ye’s, in Hardie’s translation; Keswick reads the garden’s cosmology and its debt to the geomancers, and Clunas the Ming garden as its owners actually used it. The devices are drawn as ideas, not from any one garden.

1The mountain: the tallest plant, or a rock, behind the seat against the side wall
2The water: a bowl or a basin before the seat, still, in the light, toward the open side
3The turned approach: a screen plant between the balcony door and the seat, so the view is arrived at
4The borrowed view: the rail left clear for one stretch, planted on either side of it
5The winding path: from the door round the table to the seat, no straight line from door to rail
6The wall: the rail planted along its length, the street kept out and the view held

Plan 03 The garden, on a balcony A living room of four metres by three and a half with a balcony of four by one and a half along its south side, and the six devices of the scholar’s garden set out on it at the scale of pots. The tallest plant, or a rock, stands against the side wall behind the seat and is the mountain: the seat has something solid behind it and the view before it, which is the command position with a chair in it. The water is a bowl or a shallow basin before the seat, still and in the light, toward the open side of the balcony, where the manual would have the pond before the hall. A screen plant stands between the balcony door and the seat, so that a person who steps out does not see the whole balcony at once but turns to it, which is the turned approach at a metre’s scale. The rail is planted along its length, the garden’s wall, except for one stretch left clear opposite the seat, which frames the one thing beyond it worth seeing and hides the rest: the borrowed view, cut with pots instead of a wall. The route from the door to the seat goes round the table and not straight, and nothing runs in a line from the living-room door to the rail. Six pots and a bowl; the manual entire.

Feng shui in the city 4 drawings

Plan 01 Central, Hong Kong, read from the harbour A schematic plan of the district as the practitioners read it, north at the top and not to scale. The harbour runs along the top. The bank of 1985 stands on its square with the open ground of the square and the harbour before it as its bright hall, its ground floor left open beneath the building so that, in the reading the city gave it, the dragon of the hill could pass through to the water; its two bronze lions face the harbour. The tower of 1990 stands to the east, a shaft of triangular prisms whose edges the city read as knives, and the two lines drawn from them run to the bank and up the hill to the governor’s house, which planted willows against the one aimed at it. Between the two, a decade later, a square block was built which its owners’ practitioners described as a shield, its four faces flat and its corners blunt. Behind everything the hill, the Peak, is the tortoise of the whole district. None of the buildings was sited by a geomancer; all of them were read by the city, which is the point of the drawing.

Fig. 02 A tower on a hillside with a hole through it, in elevation, the form Hong Kong’s coast has made familiar and its practitioners call a dragon gate. The hill rises behind the block and the sea lies in front of it; the tower would stand across the line between them, and the city’s reading is that the dragon that lives in the hill must be able to reach the water, so a gap is left in the building for it to pass, several storeys high, at the level the reading says the path runs. The developers who build the gaps say the same thing in their brochures and lose the flats the gap would have held, which is the measure of what the reading is worth in that market. A designer reads the gap as a view corridor, a wind path and a break in a wall of towers, and finds the city’s dragon a good planning rule under another name. The drawing is a type, not a particular building; the coast between Repulse Bay and Stanley has several, and the practice spread to the new towns. The dragon is the hill’s, as the four animals essay gives it, and the gate keeps its line to the sea open.

Fig. 03 Two modern plans laid out to a practitioner’s reading, both of them acknowledged by their owners rather than guessed at by observers. On the left the Lantau park that opened in 2005: the main entrance was turned twelve degrees from the axis the plan first gave it, drawn here as the ghosted line against the solid one, and a bend was put in the walkway from the railway station so that qi arriving at the gate would not run straight through the park and out to the sea. The hotels have no fourth floors and the cash registers were placed by the same reading. Nothing on the plan is a concession that cost anything: a walkway that bends is what a designer would draw for a queue, and a gate turned off the axis of its approach is what the tradition has asked for since the screen wall. On the right the Singapore complex of 1995: five towers set out as a hand, four tall ones for the fingers and a short one for the thumb, with a bronze ring fountain in the palm, which the owners sell as the Fountain of Wealth and which is the tradition’s water held inside the site rather than let out of it. Neither plan is evidence that a reading brings fortune. Both are evidence of the thing the city essay argues, that a market which believes it will, builds it. The Lantau accounts were given by the company at the opening and reported widely; the Singapore complex is marketed on its reading by its own management. Bruun 2008 and Emmons 1992 for the practice in the region’s commerce; Mak 2005 for what developers ask practitioners for. The plans are diagrams of the two decisions, not surveys.

Fig. 04 The central axis of Beijing, north up, the line the Yongle emperor’s planners laid in the 1420s over the Yuan capital’s and the Ming and Qing kept. It runs seven point eight kilometres from the Yongding Gate of the outer city at the south to the Bell Tower at the north, and every building of consequence stands on it or faces it in pairs: the Temple of Heaven and the Altar of Agriculture flank it in the outer city, the Zhengyang Gate carries it into the inner city, Tiananmen into the imperial city and the Meridian Gate into the palace, whose three halls stand on it with the throne facing south at the centre of the whole; behind the palace’s back gate rises Jingshan, the hill raised from the spoil of the moat so that the emperor’s house should have a mountain behind it, which is the Form School’s sentence built at the scale of an empire; and beyond it the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower close the line. The axis was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2024 as a single work, which is what it is: a reading of a site drawn seven kilometres long and kept for six hundred years. The distances are approximate and along the line; Steinhardt gives the plan and its Yuan and Ming layers, Schinz the cosmology of the grid. The Gate of Earthly Peace, which stood between Jingshan and the Drum Tower, was demolished in 1954 and is not drawn.

Qi, and what the word does 4 drawings

Fig. 01 The character at work. Qi is written 氣, the vapour 气 rising from rice 米, and the older form is the vapour alone; the same character makes the everyday Chinese words for weather, air, temperature, pressure, the atmosphere of a room, a breath or a scent, and luck. Sheng qi, the vital breath the Zangshu says a burial should ride, is in modern speech the ordinary word for getting angry. A word that does this much work in the street is not a technical term, and the tradition that borrowed it did not make it one: it uses qi as a sailor uses weather, for how a place is behaving. Pronunciations in standard Mandarin with tone marks; the older spelling ch’i, in Wade–Giles, is the same word, and the Japanese ki of aikido and the Korean gi are its borrowings.

Fig. 02 The Zangshu’s sentence, drawn. Left: a house on open ground, where wind moves freely and, in the text’s terms, qi is scattered. Right: the classical site, the “armchair”: a hill behind, lower ridges to either side, water crossing the open ground in front. The four sides carry the names the tradition gave them.

Fig. 03 The same room four times, with the tradition’s word above each and the science’s name beneath it. The armchair seat, a wall behind and the room before, is sheng qi at the scale of a chair and prospect and refuge in Appleton’s vocabulary, the preference for seeing without being seen that the site treats as the tradition’s best-supported rule. The through-line, a door in line with a window, is qi rushing and a draught; the dead corner behind the door is qi pooling and a room nobody uses. Stale qi is stale air first of all, and the manuals’ instruction to open the window every morning is a rule about the carbon dioxide of a closed room, which the studies put over a thousand parts per million within an hour of two people shutting the door. The bright hall inside the door is the tradition’s insistence on arrival, a place to pause and be seen, and the difference between a hall and a corridor. Four words, four measurements; the tradition compressed the designer’s list into one syllable and the site uncompresses it. Appleton 1975 for prospect and refuge; Evans 2003 for crowding and control; Allen 2016 and the windows guide for the carbon dioxide; Feuchtwang 1974 for the order in which a practitioner reads them.

Plan 04 The line and the path: a door facing a window down a corridor, a screen that breaks the line, and the route that bends into the rooms The ghosted line runs from the front door to the window at the end of the corridor without meeting anything: the arrangement the manuals call piercing the hall, in which qi is said to run straight through and out. The screen or plant across the corridor breaks it. The solid route is the one a person takes, bending into the living room and the bedroom; the tradition wants that route to turn, and reads a house where it does as one where qi lingers.

The body and the house 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The body and the site, drawn with the same words. A: a standing figure as the physicians drew it, with the channels, the jing luo, running down the limbs and the trunk, the points on them, the xue, where a needle is set, and the sea of qi below the navel where the physicians read it as gathering. B: a site as the geomancers drew it, with the veins, the long mai, descending from the range to the lair, which is also called the xue, where the grave or the house is set, and the bright hall before it where the qi gathers and the water holds it. The two drawings share every term: qi flows along channels, gathers at points, is held by what encloses it and scattered by what exposes it; the physician reads a pulse and the geomancer a hill, and both call what they find by the same names. The Book of Burial borrowed its language from the medicine, and the borrowing is the drawing. The channels are schematic, not the fourteen of the acupuncture charts, and the veins are the Form school’s diagram; the point of the sheet is the words, which Unschuld traces in the medicine and Paton in the burial texts. Neither drawing claims the other is true.

Fig. 02 The five phases as the medicine and the house share them, one row to a phase. The first four columns are the house’s: the direction the compass gives each phase, the season, the colour the colour guide draws. The last three are the physicians’: the organ each phase governs in the Inner Classic, the liver, the heart, the spleen, the lung and the kidney; the emotion that belongs to it; and the flavour that nourishes it. The table is one table, made in the Han and used since by both arts, and it is why a practitioner can say that a west-facing bedroom is Metal and a physician that a cough is Metal and both be speaking the same system. What the table does not say is that the one causes the other; it says that the tradition sorted the world into five, and sorted rooms and bodies alike. The correspondences are the Inner Classic’s as Unschuld and Sivin give them; the late-summer season for Earth is the classical one, and some tables put Earth between every season instead. The house’s columns are the site’s own, from the Five Elements essay.

Fig. 03 The four examinations, turned on a body and on a site. The physician’s method in the Inner Classic is diagnosis by outward sign in four steps, looking, listening and smelling, asking and touching, and the geomancer’s reading of a site is the same four steps turned on a landscape. Looking reads the complexion and the tongue on one side and the range’s colour and vigour on the other, and both sort what they see by the five phases. Listening reads the voice and the breath on one side and the wind in the pass and the pace of the water on the other, and both are listening for flow. Asking takes the patient’s history on one side and the household’s on the other, who fell ill and what was built when, with the almanac’s year as the geomancer’s calendar. Touching is the pulse at the wrist, three positions and two depths, on one side, and on the other the soil, which the manuals had the practitioner weigh and taste, and the needle on the compass plate, whose tremor the luopan essay gives. Each row ends in the same conclusion, the state of the channels beneath, and the two experts wrote it in the same words. The four examinations, si zhen, are the Inner Classic’s and every later manual’s; Kuriyama’s history is of the looking and the touching. The geomancer’s column is the Form School’s five steps, redistributed by sense; the soil test is in the Song and Ming manuals and Paton’s translations.

Yin and yang in a room 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The word, drawn. A: a hill in section with the sun to the south, on the right. Its south face is lit, warm and dry, and that face is yang, 陽; its north face is in its own shadow, cold and damp, and that face is yin, 陰; both characters carry the hill at their left. The village stands on the lit side, which is where a Chinese village stands, and the fields behind the ridge get the afternoon. B: the same section as a room. The window is the south face, the inner wall the north; the desk and the table stand at the lit end, where work and eating belong, and the bed and the reading chair at the shaded end, where rest belongs. A room read this way has a yang end and a yin end, and the only question the pair asks is whether each thing is at the end that suits it. The hill is the oldest sense of the words, older than the cosmology by centuries; the Book of Songs uses yang for the sunny side of a hill and yin for the shaded bank of a river. The room is four metres deep at 40 units to the metre.

Fig. 02 The day as the tradition reads it: yang rising from dawn to noon, yin falling from dusk to midnight, and the rooms of a house placed at the hours that use them. Lighter is yang, darker is yin. The kitchen and the desk belong to the rising half of the day, the living room and the bed to the falling half; the numbers on the outer ring are the clock, the two shades of the ring are the tradition’s day. A house that puts its bright rooms where the morning is and its dark rooms where the night is has followed the ring without knowing it; a flat that puts the bed at the morning window is working against it.

Plan 03 One room, two ends: the window end that works and the inner end that rests The window makes the yang end: light, movement, the desk and the table. The inner wall makes the yin end: shade, stillness, the bed and a chair to read in. The bands of grey are the light as it falls off from the window; the dotted line across the middle is where the room changes character. The tradition asks each activity to sit at the end that suits it, and asks the room to keep both ends rather than flood one with the other.

The schools of feng shui 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The schools as a table: what each reads, with what, what it gives, and since when. Form reads hills, water, roads and sight lines by eye and gives the site and the seat; it is the oldest layer and the one every other school assumes. Eight Mansions reads the sitting of the house and the birth year of the householder with an ordinary compass and gives four good and four bad directions. Flying Stars reads the facing and the date of building with a luopan and the almanac and gives a chart of nine numbers that changes by period. San He reads the hills and the water by bearing on the three-plate luopan and gives the water mouth and the dragon. The Black Sect reads the door and a wish, with no instrument, and gives nine life areas and a box of cures. The first row is tradition; the next three are schools of the Compass branch; the last is a graft, and the site’s labels follow the rows. The dates are the dates of the methods as practised, not of the texts they cite: Eight Mansions is Ming in its manuals and claims Tang ancestors, Flying Stars is Qing and claims the Song, San He is attributed to Yang Yunsong of the Tang, and the Black Sect was taught in the United States from the 1980s. A book that will not say which row it is on is on the last.

Fig. 02 One flat, two baguas. Left: the grid laid by compass, north up, as the Compass School does; the Xun sector, which the popular tradition calls wealth, is the south-east room. Right: the same grid laid from the front door, as the Black Sect school does; standing in the door and looking in, the far-left corner is wealth, and it is the south-west room. The two methods are not two answers to one question; they are two questions. The compass grid asks where a sector lies on the earth; the door grid asks where it lies in the experience of walking in. This is why two confident sources can put your wealth corner in different rooms, and why this site, when it lays the grid at all, lays it by the compass and says so.

Fig. 03 The schools as a tree. At the root, the classical siting art of the Han and after, the practice the Zangshu describes. Two branches: Form, which reads landform by eye and gave the tradition the armchair and the four animals, and Compass, which reads bearings with the luopan and the trigrams. The Compass branch divides into its methods, San He, Eight Mansions and Xuan Kong, each with its text. Two late grafts, dashed: the Black Sect school of Lin Yun, which reached the United States in the 1980s and laid the bagua from the door, and the paperbacks of the 1980s and 1990s, which mixed all of the above and are the feng shui most readers meet. Dates are those of the best-known texts, not of first practice; the methods are older than their treatises. The site’s six claim labels follow the tree: a rule from the root or the two branches is tradition, one from a twig is school.

The four animals 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The four palaces of the Han sky, as the bronze mirrors and the tomb tiles of the second century BC laid them out. The circle is heaven and the square at its centre the earth; the ring is the twenty-eight lunar mansions, the stations of the moon, in four quarters of seven, and each quarter is an animal, a direction, a season and an element: the Azure Dragon of the east and spring, Wood; the Vermilion Bird of the south and summer, Fire; the White Tiger of the west and autumn, Metal; the Black Tortoise of the north and winter, Water, the one the texts call the Dark Warrior, a tortoise with a snake wound round it. The Book of Burial took the four down from the sky and set them round a grave, and every site reading since has looked for them in the hills. North is at the top, as on every plan on this site, so the dragon’s east is at the reader’s right; the Book of Burial’s “dragon on the left” is the left of a site that faces south, which is the same side. The quarters are the Han correlation, in which the four animals, the four seasons and four of the Five Elements were one table; the earth at the centre took the fifth.

Fig. 02 The classical site in section, along its axis from behind to in front. At the left the ancestor mountain, the highest point the range is followed down from; then the parent mountain, the last peak before the site; between them and the knoll run the dragon veins, the ridges the Form school reads as the channels of qi, drawn as the dotted line descending to the lair, where the house stands with its back to the slope. Before the door the bright hall, the flat open ground the manuals want level and wide; at its edge the water, crossing the view slowly; beyond it the table hill, low enough to sit under the eye line from the door, which is dashed; and beyond that the facing mountain, rising again into view. The site is the hollow between two rises, protected behind and open before, and the section is what the four animals look like from the side. The profile is a diagram, not a survey: the heights are exaggerated and the distances compressed, and a real site may have a slope where the drawing has a peak. The rule the section shows is the one the manuals repeat, that what is behind should be higher than the site, what is before it lower than the eye, and what is furthest in front visible again.

Fig. 03 The dragon and the tiger at two scales, both facing south, so that the site’s left is the reader’s right. A: the site in plan. The Black Tortoise is the hill behind; the Azure Dragon the ridge on the site’s left, which the Book of Burial wants coiling, long and a little higher; the White Tiger the ridge on the right, which it wants crouching, shorter and lower; the Vermilion Bird the open ground in front, the bright hall, with the water crossing beyond it. B: the room. The sitter’s back is to the wall, the tall bookcase stands on the sitter’s left, the dragon side, the low table on the right, the tiger side, the floor is open in front and the door is in view. The practitioners’ rule that the left of a seat or a bed should carry the taller piece and the right the lower is the Book of Burial’s sentence about the ridges, brought indoors. A tiger higher than its dragon is the fault the manuals name most often, the tiger that “raises its head”; in a room it is a wardrobe on the right of the bed and nothing on the left, and the remedy is to swap them. Left and right are the site’s and the sitter’s, facing out; a reader facing the drawing must turn round.

The dragon veins 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The three trunk dragons, drawn as the Form School drew them, which is as a schema and not a map. The Song and Ming compendia traced every mountain of China to Kunlun in the far west, the ancestor of the dragons, and read three great trunks running from it to the eastern sea: the northern trunk above the Yellow River, ending at the gulf and carrying Beijing; the central trunk between the Yellow River and the Yangtze, carrying the old capitals of the central plain, Luoyang and Kaifeng; and the southern trunk below the Yangtze, branching through the hills of the south to the coast and carrying Nanjing and Hangzhou. Each trunk throws off branch dragons, each branch smaller ones, and every site the school read, down to a grave on a hillside, was located on this tree: a lair at the end of a living vein that had come, by however many turnings, from Kunlun. The rivers are the dragons’ boundaries, because a vein cannot cross water, and the sea is where all three stop. The three-trunk scheme is stated in the Song geomantic literature and repeated in every Ming and Qing compendium; Needham traces it and de Groot recorded it from the Fujian masters. It is a cosmological geography, drawn here with the rivers roughly where they run and everything else schematic.

1The ancestor mountain, zu shan, tall and jagged, the origin of the whole branch
2The vein turning as it comes down, never straight: the sign that it is alive
3A pass, guo xia, where the ridge narrows and dips before it climbs again
4The side ridges thrown off like a centipede’s legs, sheltering the vein
5The parent hill, fu mu shan, the last rise behind the lair
6The lair, xue, where the vein slows, opens and settles
7The two arms, dragon and tiger, the last side ridges folded round
8The water that followed the vein on both sides meeting in front, and leaving by the water mouth

Plan 02 A dragon followed backward, in plan The walk the Han Long Jing teaches, drawn from above. A practitioner reading a site in the hills starts at the lair, the xue where the house or the grave will stand, and walks the vein backward: behind the lair the parent hill, behind that the higher hills the ridge came down through, behind them all the ancestor mountain, tall and often jagged, from which the whole branch descended. Between the ancestor and the lair the vein is judged by its movement. It should come down in turns and not in a line; it should throw off side ridges, the centipede’s legs, which shelter it; and it should dip and rise, every dip a pass where the ridge narrows before it climbs again, which the school reads as the proof that the vein is alive. Near the lair it slows, opens its two arms and settles, and the water that has followed it down on either side meets in front and leaves by the water mouth. A geologist sees a drainage divide, its cols, and the stable, well-watered foot of a mature upland; the school saw a dragon; the site is the same one.

Fig. 03 The nine star peaks of the Han Long Jing, the Form School’s vocabulary for the shape of a hill, each named after a star of the Dipper and its two attendants and each given an element by its outline. Tanlang, the greedy wolf, is the upright pointed peak of Wood, the best of the nine; Jumen, the great gate, is the flat-topped square hill of Earth; Wuqu, the martial bend, is the round dome of Metal; Zuofu and Youbi, the two assistants, are the low rounded hill and the barely visible rise that flank a lair. The four the school reads as ill-omened are Lucun, lumpy and thrown out in feet; Wenqu, low and winding like a snake; Lianzhen, jagged as a row of flames, which is the Fire peak and the one the texts call the ancestor mountain when it stands far behind a site, terrible up close and right at a distance; and Pojun, the broken army, torn and saw-toothed. A dragon is read as a sequence of these, and a good one changes shape as it comes down, from Lianzhen at the source through Wuqu and Jumen to a Tanlang or a Zuofu at the lair. The names are those of the Han Long Jing, the Shaking Dragon Classic attributed to Yang Yunsong; the same nine stars appear on the luopan and in Flying Stars with different work to do. Skinner’s manual gives the shapes in English with drawings and Paton the text; the lucky and unlucky reading follows the text, with Wenqu and Lianzhen each having a good use in the right place.

The command position 4 drawings

Fig. 01 What a seated person sees without turning. The same room, door at the bottom left, with the chair facing three ways; the soft wedge is the binocular field of view, about a hundred and twenty degrees, drawn from the sitter’s eye. A: the desk against the far wall, the sitter facing it, the door behind them and wholly outside the field; anyone entering is heard before they are seen, which is the arrangement the tradition names as worst and most people fall into. B: the desk along the side wall, the door at the edge of the field; it can be seen, but only by turning the head, and a person working looks away from it. C: the desk on the diagonal, its back to the corner, the door well inside the field; the sitter sees it without moving, and the wall behind them is solid. The third is the command position, and the drawing is the reason it works. The field of view is Panero and Zelnik’s: about sixty degrees to either side of the line of sight for both eyes together, with peripheral vision beyond it to about ninety, and the eyes turning comfortably fifteen degrees and the head forty-five. A door within thirty degrees of the line of sight is seen without effort; one at ninety is a glimpse; one at a hundred and eighty is a sound. Scale 40 units to the metre.

Fig. 02 The command position, four times. In each room the door is at the bottom left; the solid mark is the recommended position and the dashed line is its view of the door. The same three conditions place a bed, a desk, the main seat and, on an island, the cook. Where a room cannot give all three, keep the solid wall behind and give up the diagonal first. The stove on an island is the tradition’s ideal and a renovation; a mirror or polished splashback that shows the door is the everyday version.

Fig. 03 One rule, eight seats. The command position is a single sentence, a solid wall behind, the door in view and not in its line, and the site applies it to every place it puts a body, with a third condition that changes with the seat: the bed’s is the window and the beam it must not lie under, the desk’s is the side the window goes, the sofa’s is the other seats, the host’s is the guest, the cook’s is the sink, the sick bed’s is the view, the child’s is the writing hand, the till’s is the door’s line. The ledger gives the eight with the guide that draws each, so that a reader who has learned the rule in one room can find it in the next. Where two conditions cannot both be had, the guides give the order to give them up in, and it is always the same: the wall first, the door second, the third condition last. The rule is the Form school’s and the site’s first; the compass schools’ direction for a bed or a desk is applied after it, never instead, and the Eight Mansions essay says so.

Fig. 04 The three conditions, given up in order. One: the bed has the wall behind its head, the door in view from the pillow and the door’s line clear of it, which is the rule. Two: the room has only one solid wall and it faces the door, so the bed stands in the door’s line; it keeps the wall, and the tradition accepts it. Three: the only solid wall puts the door behind the sleeper; the bed keeps the wall and a mirror on the side wall shows the door from the pillow without reflecting the bed. Four, ghosted: the bed floated in the middle of the room, which sees everything and is backed by nothing; the tradition puts a table there and the bed elsewhere. The order is the manuals’: the diagonal is the first thing to lose, the view the second, and the wall is not lost. A room that cannot give a bed a wall is a room that wants a different piece of furniture in that place.

The water dragon 3 drawings

Fig. 01 Six forms of water as the Water Dragon Classic reads them, the house drawn solid and the water in blue, each read from the door. A: the jade belt, a river that bends round the site with its belly toward the house, which the classic reads as water embracing and holding, and which every manual since has wanted in front of a door. B: the reverse bow, the same bend with its back to the house, the outer edge of the curve drawn across the front like a blade, which the manuals list among the sha. C: shooting water, a straight reach aimed at the door, read as qi arriving too fast to be held, the water’s form of the road that runs at a house. D: leaving water, a straight reach running away from the site in full view, read as wealth seen going; the classic wants water to leave out of sight, behind a turn or a hill. E: the meeting, two streams joining before the site with the house in the fork, which the classic prizes, since two waters hold better than one. F: the pool, still water before the door, the bright hall filled, which the manuals allow when it is clean, in scale and not too near. The reading is the Form school’s, and it is also, as the section beside it shows, a river engineer’s. The forms are the ones Paton’s translation of the classic gives and the yang-house manuals repeat; the classic was written for the plains of the Yangtze delta, where there were no hills and the water did all the work of the landform. The site’s water features guide takes the same forms indoors at the scale of a bowl.

Fig. 02 A bend of a river, in plan above and in section below, read by the river engineer and the geomancer at once. In a bend the current runs fastest along the outside of the curve, where it cuts the bank steep and carries it away, and slackest along the inside, where it drops what it carries and builds a gentle bar of sand and silt that grows year by year. The house on the inner bank, in the belly of the bend, stands on ground that is being added to, with the water embracing it and the flood arriving slowly: the tradition’s jade belt. The house on the outer bank stands on ground that is being taken away, with the water’s back to it and the current’s force aimed at its foundations: the tradition’s reverse bow. Leopold, Wolman and Miller’s text on rivers gives the mechanism, and the Water Dragon Classic, three centuries earlier, gave the rule without it. The section is exaggerated in height; a real bar rises by centimetres a year and a real cut bank falls by metres in a flood. The rule holds for any bend, from a river to a lane, and the site’s sha catalogue applies it to roads.

Fig. 03 Where the classic and the flood engineer part, in one section across a bend. The river runs in its channel at the left, cutting into the outer bank, which is the bow the classic refuses; on the inside of the bend it drops what it carries and builds the point bar, the low, level, fertile ground in the belly of the belt that the classic and the farmer both want. Beyond the bar lies the floodplain, which the river covers in a wet year and buries in silt, and beyond the floodplain the terrace, an older floodplain the river cut down from and no longer reaches, and then the hill. The classic’s house in the belly of the bend stands on the bar or the floodplain, the best land and the lowest; Leopold’s river puts the flood line over it once in a decade or a century, and the engineer’s house stands on the terrace, inside the bend still, with the water in front and the hill behind, above the line. The classic was written by people who had watched rivers for a thousand years and it does not mention the flood line, because its readers knew where it was; a reader who does not should ask the flood map before the compass. The section is schematic; the terms are Leopold, Wolman and Miller’s. Flood maps are public in most countries and give the hundred-year line, which is the line the terrace is above and the bar is below.

Sha, the catalogue of faults 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The faults, by how far they are from the person they are aimed at. At the centre a sleeper; around them four bands. An arm’s length: the wall blade, the corner of a wardrobe, the beam over the pillow, the faults a body registers directly, as an edge at the shoulder or a weight over the head. The room: the door in line with the window, the desk in the corridor’s line, the stair landing at the door, the faults of draught and sight line, felt as the watched door. The street: the road running at the house, the road curving away, the corner across the road, seen and heard as headlights, engine noise and exposure, and answered by a hedge. The skyline: the slit between two towers, the edge of a block, the pylon on the hill, which nobody feels who has not been told to, and which the site treats as a matter of view. The tradition uses one word for all four bands; the evidence thins with every band outward, and the drawing says where. The bands are the site’s judgement, not the manuals’: the manuals treat the four ranges with the same word and the same alarm. Inside a room the case is perceptible; at the skyline it is a picture, and a picture is answered by a hedge or a curtain for the view’s sake, which the outside page draws.

Fig. 02 The named faults on one sheet. Above, four that stand outside the house: a road running at the door; a road that curves away with its back to the house, the reverse bow; the pointed corner of a neighbouring building aimed at a window; and the slit between two towers, the sky-cut. Below, four inside: the door in line with a window, the through-house; a beam across a bed; a wall’s edge in line with a bed, the wall blade; and a stair that lands at the entrance. In each the ghosted arrow is the line the tradition reads, and the solid shape is what it is aimed at. Every sha in the catalogue is a line, an edge or a gap aimed at a place where a body rests or arrives. The names are the manuals’, Chinese first and English after; the drawings are the site’s, in the notation used everywhere else on it.

Fig. 03 The eight faults answered. The ghosted arrow is still the line from the catalogue; the solid additions are what the tradition puts in its way. Outside: a hedge across the road’s line with the path bent round it; a row of planting along the reverse bow; a curtain on the window and a plant in the line of the pointed corner; a tree between the slit and the house. Inside: a screen a step inside the door of the through-house, so that the path bends; a false ceiling under the beam where the bed cannot move; the bed moved off the wall blade’s line and a plant at the edge; a screen and a rug at the foot of the stair. Under each, which of the three moves it is. The remedies are the manuals’ and there are only three of them: interrupt the line with something that stands in it, turn the body off it, or move the thing it is aimed at. The bagua mirror the shops sell for the road and the corner is not drawn: it interrupts nothing, and the tradition that recommends it is the popular one, not the classical.

The remedies 3 drawings

Fig. 01 Why there are remedies at all. The Book of Burial opens the question by closing it: a site whose forms are right needs nothing done to it, and a site whose forms are reversed — the mountain in front of the house and the water behind it — cannot be helped and is to be abandoned. Neither of those is where a household usually finds itself. The third case is the ordinary one: level ground with nothing much behind and a road rather than a river in front, and it is for this that the manuals keep their catalogue. The remedies drawn in it are dashed because they have not been made yet: a grove planted where the tortoise should be, a pond dug where the water should be. Drawn in section, looking along the house's axis, because the argument is about what stands behind a house and what lies in front of it. The order the manuals then use is the order of cost, from moving a person, which is free, to raising a pagoda at a valley's water mouth, which is a district's work and a generation's money; the catalogue that follows in the essay is the catalogue of what was built, and the remedies never include an object in a room.

Fig. 02 The classical catalogue of remedies, which is short and is made of building, not of objects. The spirit screen, a wall set inside the gate, is the oldest and the model for all the rest: it takes a line that would run straight into the court and turns it, and every screen, plant and curtain the room guides place across a door’s line is a small one. The stone that dares, a slab cut with the words Taishan shi gan dang, is set at the point where a road or a lane ends at a house and takes the rush in the house’s place, and is the one remedy that is an inscription. The bagua mirror over a lintel faces outward at a road, a corner or a ridge, and is an exterior object in the tradition, never an indoor one. The pagoda is the remedy of a district: built at the water mouth of a valley, where the stream leaves the view, to close the gap and hold the qi of the whole settlement, and the villages of Guangdong and Fujian raised hundreds in the Ming and Qing for the examination luck of their sons. The half-moon pond before an ancestral hall gives the hall its bright hall of water, and is dug, not bought. The door gods and the couplets on the leaves guard the threshold, and are renewed every New Year. Six remedies, and five of them are walls, stones, towers, ponds and paper; the tradition corrected a site by building on it. The stone that dares takes its words from Mount Tai, the eastern peak, and Knapp records them on lanes across the south; de Groot in 1897 described the pagodas and the screens as the remedies the Fujian masters prescribed, and the mirror as the one the households bought. The wind chime, the crystal and the three-legged toad are not in the catalogue.

Plan 03 A village with its remedies A settlement in the Form School’s position, the back hill to the north, the stream passing in front from east to west, and the five remedies the district would have built between the Ming and the Qing. The pagoda stands at the water mouth in the south-west, where the stream leaves the valley’s view, with a grove of trees planted to close the gap beside it; together they hold what the water would carry away, and the pagoda’s upper storey was the village’s literary shrine. The half-moon pond lies before the ancestral hall, dug so that the hall has water in its bright hall, and the hall’s gate has a spirit screen inside it. The lane from the east road ends at the village, and the stone that dares stands at its end. The one house whose door the western ridge points at wears a bagua mirror. Everything on the drawing except the mirror is earth, stone, water and trees, built once and kept for centuries; the district that built them was correcting its valley, not decorating it.

The luopan and the twenty-four mountains 4 drawings

Fig. 01 The instrument’s descent, with the dates the texts themselves give. It begins with the shi, the cosmograph of the Han: a round heaven plate turning on a pin above a square earth plate, the heaven plate carrying the Dipper and the lunar mansions, the earth plate carrying twenty-four names around its rim. Those twenty-four are the mountains of the modern luopan, and they are older than the compass by centuries, because they were a way of naming the sky before they were a way of siting a house. Wang Chong describes a south-pointing spoon about 80 CE, and Needham’s reconstruction sets it on the bronze plate of such a board. In 1088 Shen Kuo describes a needle rubbed on a lodestone, records that it always inclines slightly to the east, which is the first notice of magnetic declination anywhere in the world, and tries four ways of mounting it, drawn along the bottom of this sheet: floating on water, balanced on a fingernail, resting on the rim of a bowl, and hung from a single fibre of new silk, which he found best. Only in 1119 does Zhu Yu put the needle in a sailor’s hands, thirty years after the diviner had it. By the Ming the instrument has the form it keeps: a square base of hardwood, a dial that turns within it, a red thread stretched across to read against, and the ring of twenty-four names that came off the Han board and has never left. Wang Chong, Lunheng, c. 80 CE; Shen Kuo, Mengxi Bitan, 1088; Zhu Yu, Pingzhou Ketan, 1119; Needham 1962 for the reconstruction and the order, Li Shu-hua 1954 for the same reading of the same texts. The instruments are drawn as diagrams of their principle, not as portraits of surviving examples.

Fig. 02 The anatomy of a luopan, from the centre out. The heaven pool holds the needle over a red line that gives it its rest, the south end marked. Around it the rings: the eight trigrams in the Earlier Heaven order, which every instrument carries and no reading uses; the earth plate, the twenty-four mountains on which the facing and the sitting of a building are read; the seventy-two dragons, each mountain divided in three and given a stem and a branch; the human plate, the same twenty-four mountains turned seven and a half degrees anticlockwise, on which the San He school reads the surrounding hills; the hundred and twenty gold divisions, five to a mountain, the fine scale on which a coffin or a ridge is set; the heaven plate, the mountains turned seven and a half degrees clockwise, for the water; and the twenty-eight lunar mansions, the sky’s own ring, with the three hundred and sixty degrees outside them. The square base carries two red threads at right angles, and a reading is taken where the thread crosses the rings. A key, not a working dial: the rings are drawn as bands and their divisions are left off, and a real instrument carries between a dozen and forty of them in an order that varies by maker and school. The Mountains drawing below gives the one ring a reader needs in full. The names and the order here follow Skinner’s compendium and the Wanan instruments of Anhui, made in the same workshops since the eighteenth century.

Fig. 03 The twenty-four mountains. Each of the eight directions is divided into three sectors of fifteen degrees, named from the twelve branches (the animals), eight of the ten stems, and the four corner trigrams. The tint is the sector’s element; the centre sector of each direction is the branch that names it: Zi for north, Mao for east, Wu for south, You for west. Drawn north up. A classical luopan is read with south at the top, and its dial is turned until the needle sits in the red thread; the reading is then taken from the ring under the thread.

Fig. 04 Taking a reading. A: stand inside the doorway facing out, hold the plate level with one edge square to the door, and turn the dial until the needle rests in the heaven pool; the red thread that runs from you through the door crosses the outer ring at the facing. B: take it three times, at the threshold, a pace inside and a pace outside, and keep the one that repeats. C: steel in a door frame, a car at the kerb or a radiator pulls the needle; a reading that changes as you move is one to take again a metre further on. The plate is drawn from above, as the person holding it sees it. The dial turns under the fixed threads; the outer ring here carries the twenty-four mountains, and a full luopan carries many more rings beneath.

Choosing a day 3 drawings

Fig. 01 One day of the almanac, with everything its column carries. The date is given in both calendars; then the day's stem and branch, one pairing of the sixty; its officer from the cycle of twelve, which is what most households actually read; its lunar mansion from the twenty-eight; its rank among the yellow days and the black; the directions in which the year's spirits stand, which are the directions to leave alone; and last the two lists, what the day is fit for and what it is not, in which marriage, travel, moving house, opening a business, raising a beam, digging, burying, cutting cloth and bathing each appear by name. A household chooses by reading down one column for the work in hand. A practitioner reads across the columns for the client's year, since the day's stem and branch are set against the person's, and a day that clashes with the year of a birth is set aside whatever the officer says. The day drawn here is made up; the structure is not. Palmer's translation gives an English reader a whole Hong Kong almanac of this kind, and Smith's study gives the history of the book and of the Board of Astronomy that once had the sole right to issue it.

Fig. 02 The twelve day officers, the jian-chu cycle of the almanac. Every day of the Chinese calendar carries one of twelve officers in turn, establish, remove, full, level, settle, hold, break, danger, complete, receive, open and close, and the almanac says beside each date what the day is fit for. The officer runs on with the earthly branch of the day, so that the cycle slips by one at each solar month, and a reader with the almanac open finds the officer printed in the column of the day. The tradition’s house days are the three marked: settle and complete for moving in, open for opening a door or a business, with the ridge beam raised on a complete or a settle day; break and close are for demolition and burial, and danger for nothing that involves a height. Filled cells are the days the almanac reads as good, open cells the mixed and the bad. The senses follow the almanac’s own glosses as Palmer’s translation of the Tong Shu gives them and Smith’s study of the calendar explains them. The system is old, it is in the Han almanacs found in tombs, and it is a calendar, not a forecast: it tells a household which day the tradition has set aside for which kind of work.

Fig. 03 A month of the almanac, read for a move. Thirty days in a grid of seven, each with its officer, which advances one a day and repeats once, on the twelfth here, where the solar term changes; that repeat is how the almanac keeps the officers in step with the sun, and it is why the same date has different officers in different years. The days whose officer settles, completes or opens are tinted as fit for moving in, eight of them in this month; the break, danger and close days are marked against, for anything but demolition and burial. The animals also run one a day, and the household’s clash animal, the opposite of its own year’s, falls every twelfth day, on the fifth, the seventeenth and the twenty-ninth here, and strikes the fifth, a settle day, out. What is left is seven days in a month on which the almanac allows this household to move, which is the almanac’s usual yield: not a single day, and not any day, but a short list to put the removal van against. The grid is a schema with the rules applied, not a page from a given year’s book. The officer’s repeat at the term and the animal’s twelve-day cycle are the almanac’s; a real month may carry two terms or none.

The house through the year 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The year as the tradition keeps it. The ring is the twenty-four solar terms, fifteen degrees of the sun’s path each, from the winter solstice at the top, sunwise: the solstices and the equinoxes are named inside the ring, the starts of the four seasons are the heavier ticks between them, and the sixteen others, the rains, the dews, the heats and the snows, are the light ticks. The house’s days are set outside the ring where they fall: the sweeping of the dust and the Kitchen God’s departure in the last days of the old year, the couplets and the door gods pasted at New Year, the graves swept at Qingming, calamus and mugwort hung at the door in the fifth month against the summer’s sickness, the moon watched from the courtyard in the eighth, and the solstice, when the year turns and the family eats together. The lunar festivals drift a little against the solar ring from year to year; the terms do not. The solar terms are the calendar’s fixed frame, tied to the sun and printed in every almanac; the festivals are lunar and move within a fortnight of the places drawn. The house that keeps them is the courtyard house of the north, whose year the terms were written for.

Fig. 02 The house's face on the eve of the New Year. Two strips of verse are pasted down either side of the door and a third across the lintel; the two Tang generals who kept an emperor's nightmares away are pasted one on each leaf; the character for fortune goes on a red lozenge, set upside down because the word for upside down sounds like the word for arrives; and a pair of lanterns hangs from the eave, to be carried through the streets on the fifteenth when the festival closes. The threshold, which the tradition asks a bride to be carried over and a coffin to be lifted across, is the line all of this is arranged around. Knapp records the couplets, the gods and the reds from province to province, and notes that red paper was the one colour a commoner's house was allowed. The drawing is a southern double-leaf door at about two metres; the same dressing goes on a flat's single leaf, and the strips are sold ready-printed. Everything drawn here is paper and is renewed each year, which is the point: the house says what year it is and who lives in it, and takes it down when the year is old.

Fig. 03 One house, four times. A section through the main hall of a northern courtyard house and the court before it, drawn in each season with what the calendar changed. In winter the kang, the brick bed against the back wall, is lit from the kitchen flue and stays warm until spring; the lattice windows are papered afresh, the door curtain is cloth and the quilts are out of the chests. In spring the paper comes down at the sweeping before the New Year, the house is cleaned to the corners and the couplets and the door gods go up on the gate. In summer the lattices stand open, the mats are down on the kang, the curtain is bamboo and the mugwort and calamus hang at the door for the fifth month. In autumn the chests are opened for the quilts, the harvest goes into the store and the household sits in the court on the fifteenth of the eighth month for the moon, which the court was built to frame. The house is the same house in all four; what the tradition kept was its dressing, on the calendar’s days. The kang, the paper windows and the curtains are the northern house’s; a southern house changed its shutters and its mats and lit no kang. Knapp’s field surveys give the seasonal fittings; Bodde and Wen Zhenheng give the days.

The Lo Shu square 4 drawings

Fig. 01 The Lo Shu square. Left, the classical arrangement with south at the top: every row, column and diagonal adds to fifteen, which is what made the figure sacred. Right, the same square turned north-up, as the bagua grid appears on this site, with the direction each number carries in the Later Heaven arrangement. The numbers are the ones the Flying Star method plots onto a plan and the ones a practitioner means by “the one” or “the nine.” Five, at the centre, has no direction and belongs to Earth.

Fig. 02 The path through the square. Start at the centre, five, and follow the numbers in order: six is at the north-west, seven at the west, eight at the north-east, nine at the south, one at the north, two at the south-west, three at the east, four at the south-east, and the path returns to the centre. The line is the order in which the Flying Star method moves any number through the nine palaces: put a period’s number in the centre and count on along the path, and the chart writes itself. Drawn north up, as the square appears everywhere on this site. The path is the Lo Shu’s own, the sequence its numbers make when they are read from the centre outward, and the Han diviners already traced it with the spirit Taiyi through the Nine Palaces. It is the one thing a reader has to know to follow a Flying Star chart, and it is easier to remember as a line than as a rule.

Fig. 03 The square laid on the year. Each year has a ruling star, found by adding the digits of the year to one figure and taking it from eleven, and the star is set at the centre of the square and flown through the palaces by the Lo Shu order the essay gives, centre, north-west, west, north-east, south, north, south-west, east, south-east. The three years are drawn: 2024 with the 3 at the centre and the 5 in the west, 2025 with the 2 at the centre and the 5 in the north-east, 2026 with the 1 at the centre and the 5 in the south, which is where the almanacs and the practitioners put the year’s five yellow, the palace the school does not dig, drill or build in that year. The grids are computed by the rule and not copied, and the Flying Stars tool computes any year on the same rule. What the reader should take from them is the mechanism: one number, one order, nine palaces, and a square that has been flown this way over houses and years since the Song. The annual star is the school’s and the site records it as such; the year begins at the spring festival, early February, so that January belongs to the year before. The five yellow’s palace is the one thing about the annual chart most households ask a practitioner for, and the tool gives it.

Plan 04 The Lo Shu square laid over a flat, north up: nine palaces stretched to the plan’s outline, and one of them missing The square is stretched to the plan’s bounding rectangle and its nine cells become the nine palaces, each named by its number, its direction and its trigram. The flat is L-shaped, so the south-west palace, two, Kun, falls outside the walls and is drawn ghosted: a missing palace, which the schools read and remedy in different ways. The centre, five, is the palace the tradition wants open. The classical square is printed south up; here, as everywhere on this site, north is up, so the numbers are turned round.

Numbers, floors and doors 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The River Chart, He Tu, drawn as the Song philosophers printed it and turned so that north is at the top, as every plan on this site is. The ten numbers stand in five pairs at the five places: one and six at the north, which are Water; two and seven at the south, Fire; three and eight at the east, Wood; four and nine at the west, Metal; five and ten at the centre, Earth. The odd numbers are white dots and yang, the even black and yin, and each pair sets a small number inside and its partner, five more, outside. This is where the Five Elements got their numbers and the compass schools their pairing of numbers with directions; the Lo Shu, its companion square, is drawn on its own page. The chart is a Song reconstruction, first printed in the eleventh century and set at the front of Zhu Xi’s commentary on the Changes in 1177; the Great Commentary’s line that “the River gave forth the Chart and the Luo the Writing” is a thousand years older and describes nothing. The numbers one to five are called the generating numbers and six to ten the completing ones.

Fig. 02 The door nails by rank, four pairs of leaves in elevation. The Qing regulations fixed the count of the gilt bosses on a great door as a mark of the household’s station: nine rows of nine on each leaf of the emperor’s gates, eighty-one, nine being the greatest yang number and its square the fullest; nine by seven for a prince of the first rank; seven by seven for a duke and the ranks near him; five by five for the lords below; and none at all on the door of a commoner, however rich, whose leaves were plain and, by the same rules, not red. The nails are the one place the tradition’s numbers were written on the outside of a house, and they were written by law rather than by the compass. The leaves are vermilion, the bosses gilt, the knocker rings at the middle of each leaf in the place of a nail; the grids are as the sumptuary rules of the Collected Statutes of the Qing give them. Counting the nails on a surviving gate in Beijing still tells the rank of whoever built it.

Fig. 03 What the homophones do to a building. A: the lift panel of a tower of forty floors that numbers them as Hong Kong and much of the Chinese-speaking world do, leaving out every floor with a four in it, because four sounds like death, and the thirteenth for the Western tenants; the fortieth floor’s button reads fifty-six, and sixteen numbers are missing. B: what a number is worth when a house is sold, from the Vancouver study of Fortin, Hill and Huang: in the neighbourhoods where many buyers were Chinese, a house whose address ended in four sold for about two per cent less than the same house would have, and one ending in eight for about two and a half per cent more; elsewhere in the city the numbers made no difference. The effect is real and it is a market’s, not a building’s. The lift panel is a composite of the numbering used in Hong Kong towers, where the top floor of a building of fewer than fifty storeys can be numbered in the eighties; Vancouver’s council required consecutive numbering in new buildings in 2015. The bars are the study’s central estimates and the figures are rounded.

Eight Mansions 4 drawings

Fig. 01 Eight Mansions. Left: the eight directions sorted into the East group (north, east, south-east, south) and the West group (north-east, south-west, west, north-west). Right: the eight directions for kua 1, Kan: the four in its own group are favourable and carry the names sheng qi, tian yi, yan nian and fu wei; the other four are unfavourable. Tables as printed in Skinner (2008) and Too (1996). The left ring is the same for everyone; the right ring changes with the kua, and the four favourable directions are always the four of the person’s own group. Lineages differ on details, on the reading of kua 5, and on whether a bed is oriented by the head or the body; the method is described here, not endorsed.

Fig. 02 The whole table. Down the side, the eight kua numbers with their trigrams, East group first and West group second; across the top, the eight directions. In each cell, the name that direction carries for that kua: tinted, the four favourable, sheng qi, tian yi, yan nian and fu wei; plain, the four unfavourable, huo hai, wu gui, liu sha and jue ming. Read along a row for one person’s directions; read down a column to see that every direction is somebody’s best and somebody else’s worst, which is the couple problem in one glance. The table is the one printed in Skinner (2008) and Too (1996) and it is the same data the ring above and the calculator use. Five, which has no trigram, is read as two for men and eight for women in the convention most manuals follow. Which of the eight names carries which meaning is the school’s; the site describes the method and does not endorse it.

Plan 03 Eight Mansions on a plan: the house divided into eight sectors from its centre, for a person of kua 1 The eight sectors are taken from the centre of the plan, not from the door. For kua 1, a Kan person of the East group, the favourable sectors are north, east, south-east and south, left plain; the unfavourable ones, north-east, south-west, west and north-west, are hatched. The bed’s head is in the east, the desk faces south-east, and the front door opens in the south. Another kua turns the pattern; the calculator on this page gives yours.

Plan 04 The stove, the door and the toilet, by the school A house of twelve metres by nine sitting north and facing south, a Kan house, kua one, with its eight sectors named from the school’s table: sheng qi in the south-east, tian yi in the east, yan nian in the south and fu wei in the north are its four favourable sectors, and huo hai in the west, wu gui in the north-east, liu sha in the north-west and jue ming in the south-west its four unfavourable. The school honours the favourable sectors with the door, the bed and the hall, and presses the things it must have but will not honour into the unfavourable ones. The door is in the south-east, the sheng qi. The stove stands in the west, the huo hai, and its mouth, the front the cook feeds it from, is turned to face east, the tian yi: it sits in a bad sector and faces a good direction, which is the rule the manuals give as sit bad, face good. The toilet is in the north-west, the liu sha, pressed down. The bed, in the north-east room, is turned with its head to the east, the tian yi, since its own sector is unfavourable and the head can be pointed where the room cannot be moved. The site records the rule as the school’s; the room guides place the stove by the door and the sink.

The Four Pillars 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The two cycles the calendar counts with, as the almanac and the Four Pillars use them. The ten heavenly stems run in five pairs, a yang and a yin of each element in the generating order, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water. The twelve earthly branches carry the animals, an element each, the two hours of the day each rules, from the Rat at midnight, and the month each names, from the Tiger at the start of spring. A stem and a branch together make one of sixty pairs, and the sixty run in a cycle over the years, the months, the days and the hours; a person’s four pillars are the four pairs current at their birth. The cells are tinted by element, and the tints are the site’s five. The stems and branches are older than any use of them: the sixty-day cycle is on the Shang oracle bones of the thirteenth century BC, the animals were attached to the branches by the Han, and the elements later still. The hours are the traditional double hours; a chart cast for a modern clock time must first be converted to local solar time.

Fig. 02 A Four Pillars chart as a practitioner lays it out, for an illustrative birth: a yang Fire day in a Rabbit month of an Ox year, at the Rat hour. The four columns are the hour, the day, the month and the year, read from the right as the Chinese page reads; each is a stem over a branch, the pair current at the birth, and the small row beneath gives the stems the tradition reads as hidden inside each branch. The day’s stem, Bing, is the day master, the character that stands for the person, and everything else in the chart is read as its relations: the Wood of the month and the year feeds a Fire day master, the Earth of the hour and the year is what it produces, and the Water of the hour is what controls it. The count of the five elements under the chart is what a practitioner looks at first, and a chart with three Wood, three Earth and no Metal is read as needing what it lacks, which is where the advice about colours and directions comes from. The chart is made up to be consistent, not cast for a real person; the hour’s stem follows the day’s and the month’s follows the year’s by the tables in any almanac. The hidden stems are the standard set; the count includes the visible stems and branches only, as the simpler manuals do.

Fig. 03 How a birth chart becomes advice about a room, in three steps, for the chart the page works. The eight characters are tallied by element, and the worked chart has three Wood, three Earth, one Fire, one Water and no Metal. The practitioner names the useful god, the element the chart most needs for balance, which here is Metal, with Water to carry it; the naming is the skill of the art and two practitioners can name differently. Then the useful god is turned into the house: Metal is white, round shapes and the west, Water is blue and black, the north and a fountain, and the person is told to sleep with the head to the north, to keep a bowl of water and to work facing west. The third panel is the room that results, and the objection the design note raises is drawn in it: the wall is shared and the chart is not, and a household of four has four charts and one wall. The count and the chart are the page’s worked example; Too 1996 and Wong 1996 for the useful-god advice as the Hong Kong and Malaysian schools give it. The method is astrology applied to a room, a genuine part of the modern practice and no part of the classical one.

The twelve animals 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The twelve branches on one ring, read four ways. Each branch carries an animal, a double hour of the day, a month of the year and a direction, and the four are one arrangement: the Rat is north, midnight and the eleventh month, the month of the winter solstice; the Horse is south, noon and the fifth month, the month of the summer solstice; the Rabbit is east, sunrise and the second month, the Rooster west, sunset and the eighth. The ring runs sunwise, and a person born in the year of an animal has the branch of that year in the year pillar of the Four Pillars, where the popular horoscope stops and the diviner goes on. The six chords across the centre are the clashes, liu chong: each branch and the one opposite it, Rat and Horse, Ox and Goat, Tiger and Monkey, Rabbit and Rooster, Dragon and Dog, Snake and Pig, which the almanac reads as the pairs that cannot be joined and the day-selector reads as the animal a day, a month or a year strikes. The direction of the year’s branch is the Tai Sui, and the direction opposite it, the clash, is the Sui Po, the year-breaker, the two sectors the almanac asks a household not to dig in. The branches, hours and months are the standard ones of the almanac; the day begins at the Rat hour, eleven at night, in the traditional reckoning, and the month is the lunar month with the Tiger at the first, since the Tiger month holds the start of spring.

Fig. 02 The year’s afflictions for twelve years, computed by the almanac’s rules and not copied from one. The animal is the year’s branch, and its direction is the Tai Sui, the sector of fifteen degrees the almanac asks a household not to dig in or turn its back on; the Sui Po is the sector opposite, the year-breaker, where the clash falls. The Three Killings sit in the quarter opposite the year’s trine, so that the Monkey, Rat and Dragon years strike the south, the Tiger, Horse and Dog years the north, the Pig, Rabbit and Goat years the west and the Snake, Rooster and Ox years the east; and the annual Five Yellow is the palace the star five lands in when the year’s star is flown from the centre, which the Lo Shu essay gives. A household that keeps the four sectors quiet in a year has done what the almanac asks, and the site’s reading is the essay’s: the rule is a rule against building work in the sector, and a bed or a desk in it is not the work the almanac meant. Years begin at the spring festival, so a date in January or early February belongs to the previous animal. The Three Killings by the trine rule and the annual star by the digit rule are the Compass schools’ standard computations; Walters and Skinner give both.

Fig. 03 The twelve branches twice, and the road the animals took to reach them. Above, the cycle as the oracle bones of the Shang carry it: twelve signs for counting days, paired with the ten stems into the sixty-day count Needham calls the oldest continuous one in the world, and for something like a thousand years no animals at all. Below, the same twelve with the sequence that is first found complete in a Han tomb text of the first century before Christ. The same twelve animals in the same order are found among the Turkic and Mongol peoples of the steppe and in the Buddhist calendars of Central Asia, which is why Bodde and most scholars since read them as borrowed: they came into China with the horse and went out again with the calendar, to Japan, Korea and Vietnam, where the fourth of them is a Cat. What the drawing is arguing against is three things the animals are often taken for. They are not a zodiac: the Western signs are twelve constellations along the sun's path and they are months, while these are branches, and the year animal is a twelfth of the calendar that happens to be the twelfth people remember. They are not characters: the Four Pillars manuals read the year's branch for its element and its clashes and say nothing about tigers being brave, and the personalities are a growth of the nineteenth-century almanacs and the twentieth-century newspapers. And they are not a school of feng shui: the branches are on the luopan as directions and in the almanac as dates, and no method reads a house by the household's animals.

"Flying Stars: how a chart is built" 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The nine periods of twenty years in the Xuan Kong cycle of 180, grouped in three yuan of sixty. The number of the period is the star that sits at the centre of every chart drawn in it. Period 9 began at li chun, 4 February 2024, and runs to the start of February 2044. A house is charted by the period in which it was built or last substantially rebuilt; which works count as rebuilding is one of the points on which the school’s teachers disagree.

Fig. 02 A chart built in three steps for a house of Period 8 sitting N2 and facing S2. Each palace of the finished chart carries three numbers: the mountain star on the left, the water star on the right, the period star below. Both timely 8s land in the facing palace. North is up, as in every plan on this site; the facing is at the bottom. The dashed line in the first grid is the order in which the numbers fly: centre, north-west, west, north-east, south, north, south-west, east, south-east. Which way a star flies, up or down through the numbers, is set by the yin or yang of the mountain the house sits on or faces.

Fig. 03 Six pairs of stars as the school reads them, drawn one palace each with the mountain star on the left and the water star on the right, which is how every chart on this site is written. The colour is the star’s standing in Period 9: the 9 and the coming 1 timely, the 8 lately retired and still read kindly, and the 2, 3, 5 and 7 untimely. The double 8 at the facing is the chart most Period 8 houses were built to and the one the practitioner activated with water before the door, which is now a chart whose stars have retired; the double 9 at the sitting is the chart of the worked house, with people and wealth both at the back, which wants a hill behind the house and water behind the hill. The 2 with the 5 is the pair the school fears most, the Black Two with the Five Yellow, and it is met with metal, stillness and no building work. The 3 with the 2 is the bull fight, wood breaking earth, read as quarrels and lawsuits; the 1 with the 4 is the scholar’s pair, water feeding wood, where the study or the desk goes; the 7 with the 9 is metal under fire, and the school will not put a stove or the colour red in that palace. The readings are Shen Zhureng’s, codified in 1927, and Skinner’s and Wong’s after him. Shen shi xuan kong xue (1927) for the combinations; Skinner 2003 and Wong 2001 for the English readings. The pairs are the school’s and not the site’s: internally consistent, unsupported by any evidence, and given here so that a chart a practitioner hands you can be read.

Twelve things feng shui does not say 3 drawings

Fig. 01 Where the twelve come from. A red dot marks the source of each claim; a ring marks a school that repeats it. The left-hand column, the classical texts, is empty. Compass schools here means the Eight Mansions and Flying Star methods and their manuals; Black Sect means the Black Sect Tantric Buddhist school taught in the United States from the 1980s; folk and popular means household belief, the decorating press and the internet. None of the twelve is in the Zangshu or the compass classics.

Fig. 02 The cures on sale, as a ledger: the object, where it actually comes from, what the tradition used it for, if it used it at all, and how the site reads it. Two of the seven are the tradition’s. The bagua mirror is a Taoist charm hung outside against a road, a ridge or a roof, real in the manuals and never an indoor object; the three-legged toad is a money charm out of the folk tale of Liu Hai, sold in the Qing and kept on shop counters, a charm and not a rule. The coins on red thread are the New Year’s cash tied in threes, a folk custom the manuals do not mention. The rest are not Chinese at all: the crystals came with the New Age of the 1980s, the lucky bamboo is a Dracaena the florists of the 1990s renamed, the indoor wind chime is a Western object, since the tradition’s bells hung at temple eaves against birds and spirits, and the wealth frogs, ships and fish are the shop goods of Hong Kong and Singapore from the 1980s on. None of the seven is a rule about a house, and a reader who wants the tradition’s remedies has them in the remedies essay: a wall, a screen, a tree, a pond, a door rehung. Provenance from Smith, Bruun and the site’s own remedies essay; the toad and the coins are in the Qing charm literature Smith surveys. The site does not sell any of them and does not tell a household to throw them out.

Fig. 03 How to tell. Three questions in a row, and what a claim becomes when it fails one. A rule that names no school and only says “feng shui says” is the press: advice about a room, to be tested on the room. A rule that names a school but no text, period or practitioner is that school’s, and the site labels it so. A rule that needs something bought is a cure, one school’s object sold as a rule. A rule that passes all three is the tradition’s, or a named school’s with its text behind it, and is read as theirs. The questions are the article’s. Failing them does not make a claim false; it says what kind of claim it is, and therefore how to judge it: a rule from a text against the text, a school’s rule against the school, and a piece of advice against the room it is about.

Evidence and feng shui 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The tradition’s claims against the kind of evidence that exists for each. A red dot marks the strongest kind of study that bears on the claim; a ring at the left marks a claim nobody has tested. The studies in the upper rows are not studies of feng shui. They are studies of light, noise, damp, daylight, views, clutter and room shape that happen to test what the tradition also recommends. The four claims at the bottom are the ones the tradition is best known for, and the ones with nothing behind them but the tradition.

Plan 02 The instrumented bedroom: what the studies measure, and where they measure it Seven numbers on one room, each at the place a study put its instrument: the light reaching the pillow, the noise at the street window, the air temperature, the damp at the cold wall, what the other window looks out on, the objects on the floor, and the shape and height of the room. The key names the studies. None of the seven is a compass bearing, and none of the studies asked for one; that is the boundary of the evidence, drawn.

Fig. 03 The studies the site leans on most, in one ledger, with what each tested, where and on how many, what it found, and the tradition’s rule it bears on. None of them tested feng shui; each tested a thing the tradition asked for, a window onto trees, a sunny room, a quiet bedroom, an opened window, a cleared floor, and found it worth something, in days, doses, test scores or prices. The sizes matter and are given: Ulrich’s forty-six patients are famous and few, Heschong’s twenty-one thousand pupils are many and observational, the price studies count thousands of sales and measure a belief rather than a house. Read down the last column and the tradition’s room rules appear one by one; read down the fourth and the effects are modest, real and specific, which is what the essay says the evidence is. The numbers are the papers’, rounded; the full citations are on the sources page under research. Studies of the compass schools’ claims are absent because there are none of the kind that would go in this table.

Questions people ask 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The same bedroom four times, with the bed where each answer puts it. The room’s rule is the one every school agrees on and the one the site is sure of: the head against a solid wall, the door in view from the pillow, and the bed out of the line between the door and the opposite wall. The Eight Mansions rule turns the head toward one of the four directions the school derives from the birth year, and it belongs after the room’s rule and never instead of it, since a bed that faces its lucky direction with its head under the window has traded a rule about the room for a rule about a number. The claim that the head should point north so that the body lies along the earth’s field is not a tradition but a modern gloss, and no study has found that sleepers know which way they lie. The feet in the door is the one position every school refuses, the coffin position of the tradition and the one bed in the room that the sleeper can see the corridor from without lifting their head, which is why sleepers refuse it too. North is up; the door is on the south wall at the right and the window on the west wall. Rossbach 1987 and Too 1996 for the room’s rule; Skinner 2008 and Wong 1996 for the Eight Mansions directions; Bruun 2008 for what is tradition and what is a modern addition.

Fig. 02 The same two-room flat three times, with the wealth corner where each answer puts it. The Black Sect school lays its bagua from the door, whichever way the door faces, and the wealth corner is the far left as you come in, which is where the purple paint goes; the compass schools lay the same eight trigrams by the needle and put wealth in the south-east, the Wood sector, which in this flat is the corner by the front door and not the far one; the classical texts have no corner for money at all, and what they say about wealth they say about the door, the bright hall before it and the water that gathers there, which is the third panel. Three answers that put the money in three places are the plainest sign that the corner is each school’s convention and not a property of the room. The tradition’s advice for whichever corner you choose is the advice for every corner: light, order, something alive and nothing broken. North is up in every panel, and the door is on the south wall. Bruun 2008 for the schools and their history; Rossbach 1983 for the Black Sect bagua; Skinner 2008 and Wong 1996 for the compass sectors; the Zangshu for what the texts say about water and wealth.

Fig. 03 Where to start. One question at the root, five answers, and three pages each answer leads to first. The tree is not a course; it is the order in which the site answers the question a reader actually has, which is rarely the order of the table of contents. Every branch ends at pages that link onward, so the tree is a first step and not a syllabus. Two readers with the same question will still be on different pages by the third step; the point is that both started from what they wanted and not from a compass reading. The reading paths page gives longer sequences; the index panel searches everything.

Rooms

The outside 3 drawings

Plan 01 The site: something solid behind, planting at the flanks, open ground in front, and a path that curves to the door The house faces the road at the bottom of the plan. Behind it, a hedge or wall stands in for the tortoise; on the dragon side, which is the house’s left as it looks out, the planting is taller; on the tiger side it is lower. The open, level, lit ground before the door is the ming tang. The path from the gate curves; the ghosted straight path from the road to the door is the arrangement the tradition reads as a road aimed at the house.

Plan 02 A garden as a site: trees behind, hedges at the flanks, a path that curves to the door, water in front and off the door’s line The house sits in the upper half with its back to the trees, which are its tortoise, and hedges at the sides, its dragon and tiger. The path bends from the gate to the door; the ghosted straight path is the one the tradition reads as an arrow, and the ghosted tree stands where a tree should not, in the door’s line. The pond is in front of the house and to one side of the door, the bird’s open water. The seat has the house behind it and the garden in front. The bins are at the side, behind the hedge.

Fig. 03 The balcony as the flat’s bright hall, twice. The room is above, the rail below, and the door opens out onto a floor of three metres twenty by one metre thirty. A: the balcony as most balconies are, a store: the bicycle across the door, the boxes and the broken chair along the rail, the plants where they were put down, and no floor to stand on; it is the front garden filled with things, and the tradition reads it as the open ground before the house given up. B: the same balcony kept as open ground: two chairs, a small table, a plant at each end, the rail clear so that the view stays open, the door’s swing free, and the floor a floor. The bins and the bicycle have gone inside or down. Nothing has been bought, and the flat has recovered its outside. A balcony is the only open ground most flats have, and the tradition’s whole rule for it is that it stay open ground. The plants go at the sides, where the tradition puts the dragon and the tiger, and not along the rail, where they close the view; the seat has the flat at its back and the air in front, the command position out of doors. Scale 40 units to the metre.

Bedroom feng shui 3 drawings

Plan 01 The gradient: from the front door to the bed The rooms are shaded by where the tradition puts them between yang and yin: the hall and the kitchen at the bright, public, hot end, the living room between, and the bedroom at the far end of the flat and of the gradient, the darkest, quietest and most enclosed room, as far from the door as the plan allows. The dashed route is the way from the front door to the bed, which the tradition wants long and turned. The bed stands in the command position: head to a solid wall, the door in view, out of its line.

Plan 02 The command position, and the two positions the tradition avoids A, solid: the head against a solid wall, the door in view from the pillow and the bed out of the door’s line. This is the command position, and the dashed line is the sight line from the pillow to the door. B, ghosted: the feet in line with the door, inside the hatched strip, the arrangement the manuals call the coffin position after the way a body is carried out. C, ghosted: the head under the window, with glass instead of wall behind it and the draught and the street at the pillow.

Fig. 03 The bed in section. The headboard stands against a solid wall; above the head there is nothing, and the ghosted shelf is what the manuals take down. The ghosted beam over the bed is the one the beams guide moves the bed from under. Beneath the bed the floor is clear, and the ghosted box is what the tradition asks to be stored elsewhere. The lamp is at the side, on the table, not overhead; the window is at the side of the bed, not behind it or at its foot, and has a curtain that closes. What the section adds to the plan is the vertical rule: solid behind the head, nothing over it, nothing under it, and light from the side. Each is the command position turned on its edge.

Home office feng shui 3 drawings

Plan 01 Where the desk faces: three positions in one room A, solid: the chair with the wall behind it, the desk in front, the door in view and the window to the side. B, ghosted: the desk against the wall with the sitter’s back to the door, the arrangement most rooms fall into. C, ghosted: the sitter’s face to the wall under the window, with glare on the screen and the door behind. The window at the side gives light across the desk without glare, and is the reason A stands where it does.

Fig. 02 Three desks and one window. A: the window at the sitter’s side, the desk at right angles to it, so that daylight falls across the page and not into the eyes or onto the screen; the wall is behind the chair and the door in view. B, ghosted: the desk facing the window, so that the screen stands against the brightest thing in the room and the eyes work against it. C, ghosted: the window behind the sitter, so that it reflects in the screen and the chair has glass, not wall, at its back. The tradition’s rule is the command position: wall behind, door in view, window at the side. The lighting rule is the same drawing from the other direction: side light on the work, no bright source in the field of view, no source behind the viewer of a screen. Light from the left suits a right-handed writer; from the right, a left-handed one.

Fig. 03 What the camera sees. A: the desk with the wall behind the chair; the face takes the light from the window at the side and the background holds still, which is what a lens and a caller both want. B: the desk with the window behind the chair; the camera exposes for the brightest thing in the frame, the glass, and the face goes dark, a silhouette against a white rectangle. C: the desk with the door behind the chair; every person who passes or enters appears over the sitter’s shoulder, ghosted here, and the sitter, who cannot see them, learns of them from the faces on the screen. The three are the command position’s three conditions photographed from the other side of the desk. The video call is the first thing in a century to give the tradition’s rule for a desk a second, independent witness: the camera, which prefers the wall behind, the light from the side and the door in view for reasons of exposure and not of qi. The site draws the three because most readers now spend part of every day inside one of them.

The entrance 3 drawings

Plan 01 Inside the door: room to stop, the line through the house broken, and the furniture of arrival The front door opens at the bottom. The dashed circle is the ming tang, the bright hall, kept clear. The ghosted line from the door to the window opposite is the line through the house; the plant stands in it and breaks it. On the right, a console with a lamp and a mirror on the side wall; on the left, a seat and hooks. The ghosted bathroom door at the far end is the first thing the tradition does not want a visitor to see.

Fig. 02 What faces the front door, in four small halls with the door at the bottom of each. A: a solid wall opposite the door with a picture and a lamp on it, something to arrive at. B, ghosted: a mirror facing the door, which the manuals read as sending the arrival straight back out. C, ghosted: a toilet door in line with the entrance, the first door a visitor sees. D, ghosted: a window or a back door straight ahead, the line the tradition calls piercing the hall. The dashed line is the sight line from the threshold. The tradition wants it to end at something solid and pleasant within a few metres; the three ghosted halls end it at a reflection, a toilet and the outside.

Fig. 03 The entrance in section, with the heights that furnish it for arrival. The door opens inward onto a mat, and beside it, at a hundred and ten centimetres, the switch a hand finds in the dark. A bench at forty-five, the height of a chair, for the shoes; above it the hooks at a hundred and sixty-five, where a coat hangs clear of the seat and a tall person’s eye is not in the pegs. On the other side a console at eighty-five, thirty deep, for the keys and the post, with a lamp on it that is the entrance’s own light; and above the console a mirror whose top is at two metres, so that the tallest person in the house sees their whole head in it, on the side wall and not facing the door. The person arriving is a metre seventy, and everything is within their reach from the mat. The heights are the joiners’ and the access codes’: a switch between forty-five and a hundred and twenty from the floor, a seat at forty-five, a worktop or console at eighty-five to ninety, hooks at a hundred and sixty to a hundred and seventy for adults with a second row at a metre for children. The tradition adds only the order: mat, light, a place to put things down, and nothing in the line of the door.

The living room 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The hall, and the room that keeps its shape. A: the tang of a courtyard house, on the north side of the court and open to it through a wall of lattice doors on the south. Against the north wall, the wall of honour, stands the long altar table with the ancestors’ tablets; before it the square table, the table of the eight immortals, with the two armchairs of the host and the guest of honour either side, facing the court and the door; along the east and west walls the guests’ chairs in pairs, a tea table between each pair, facing one another across the open centre. B: the same room today. The sofa has the wall of honour and faces the door; the armchairs have the sides; the low table has the open centre; the screen has a side wall, where a seated eye finds it without the room being arranged round it; and the window has the south, where the court was. The living room the tradition wants is the hall with the furniture changed. The hall arrangement follows Knapp’s survey of the old dwellings and Wang Shixiang’s catalogue of the furniture; the pieces are drawn at their classic sizes, the altar table three metres long and the square table a metre square. The seating etiquette, host facing the door with the wall of honour behind and guests ranked outward from the host along the sides, is the command position as a rule of manners.

Plan 02 The living room: the main seat backed, the chairs at its sides, the centre kept open, and the screen to the side The door comes in from the hall at the bottom left. The sofa has the top wall behind it and sees the door; two armchairs close the circle from the sides, the way the dragon and tiger ridges close a site. The centre of the room is left open. The hearth, the hatched block, is on the left wall, the light comes from the right, the table for eating sits where the light reaches, the two red dots are the lamps, one by the seat and one in the corner daylight does not reach, and the screen sits on the bottom wall where the seated eye can find it without the room being arranged around it.

Fig. 03 Three seating plans. A: the corner group, a sofa and two chairs at right angles with the walls behind them, in which everyone sees everyone across a corner and nobody has their back to the room. B: facing pairs across a low table, two and a half to three metres apart, with a wall or a solid piece behind each. C, ghosted: the row, sofa and chairs in a line facing a screen, in which nobody sees anyone and the seats at the ends have the room at their backs. The tradition asks for backs covered and the door in view; the seating studies ask for people at an angle to one another, close enough to talk. A and B satisfy both. C is what most living rooms drift into, and the arrangement that Osmond and Sommer called sociofugal.

The kitchen 3 drawings

Plan 01 The kitchen: Fire and Water a metre apart with Wood between, and the cook facing the room The sink sits under the window on the left wall; the ghosted stove on the top counter is the ordinary arrangement, with the cook’s back to the door. The solid stove is on an island, so that the cook faces the room and sees the door, and a run of wooden worktop lies between the sink and any stove. The fridge, Water in the tradition’s reading, keeps its distance from the fire as well.

Fig. 02 A: the work triangle, with its numbers. The stove, the sink and the refrigerator make a triangle whose legs, by the kitchen planners’ rule, are each between a metre twenty and two metres seventy, and together between four and eight metres; here, on an L-shaped kitchen of three metres twenty by three, one metre seventy, one metre twenty and two metres seventy, five and a half in all. No route through the kitchen crosses it, and the tinted corner of worktop between the sink and the stove is the planners’ landing space and the tradition’s Wood between Water, the sink and the fridge, and Fire, the stove. B: the stove’s mouth, in the Eight Mansions reading. The stove sits in one of the householder’s four bad sectors, hatched, and its mouth, the side the fire is fed from, faces one of the four good ones, drawn for a person of the East group, whose good directions are east, south-east, south and north: the stove sits in the north-west and faces east. The school’s phrase is that the stove presses on the bad and faces the good. The triangle’s numbers are the National Kitchen and Bath Association’s, which descend from the Illinois studies of the 1940s; the legs in the drawing are measured from the plan. The stove’s mouth is the firebox opening of a brick stove; on a hob with no firebox the practitioners disagree about what the mouth is, the side the cook stands on or the side the controls are on, and a reader who cannot settle it should take the cook’s facing and leave the rest to the school.

Fig. 03 Four kitchens, drawn in plan with the door at the bottom of each. A: a galley, with stove and sink on the same run and a worktop between, and the other run at the cook’s back. B: an L, with the stove on the long leg and the sink round the corner. C: a U, with the stove at the base, the sink and fridge on the arms, and the cook facing the room. D: an island hob, the one arrangement that gives the cook the door in view; the manuals accept it when the island is solid to the floor and the hob has counter on every side. S is the stove, W the sink, F the fridge. In every layout Fire and Water are a worktop apart and not face to face across an aisle, and the cook at the stove has something solid behind. The work triangle, sink to stove to fridge, is drawn where it closes.

The dining room 3 drawings

Plan 01 The dining table: round, with the host’s back to the wall and the door in view The table sits away from the walls so that every chair can be reached. The host’s seat (solid) has the solid wall behind it and sees the door; the seat with its back to the door is the one the tradition gives to nobody. The ghosted long table pushed into the corner is the arrangement most small rooms fall into.

Fig. 02 Two tables and the rooms they need. A: a round table 120 centimetres across seats four, each with sixty centimetres of edge, and wants ninety centimetres of floor all round it, forty-five for the chair pulled back and forty-five for a person passing behind; a room three metres square holds it with nothing to spare. B: a rectangle of 180 by 90 seats six, two a side and one at each end, and wants the same ninety on every side; a room of 3.6 by 2.7 holds it, and the host takes the end with the solid wall behind and the door in view, while the seat nearest the door, the one that serves, has its back to it. The dotted band around each table is the ninety centimetres, and it is the part of the room most dining rooms are missing. The numbers are the furniture trade’s and the tradition’s at once: the tradition wants every chair reachable and nobody at a wall’s elbow, and ninety centimetres is what that takes. A table that cannot have its band on every side is a table that should be smaller, or round, which loses no seat to a corner.

Fig. 03 Four tables, drawn from above with the wall behind the host at the top of each and the door below. A: a round table, the tradition’s first choice, with no head and no corner, at which everyone sees everyone. B: an oval, which keeps the round table’s lack of corners and gives the host an end. C: a rectangle, with a head for the host and four corners; the manuals want no chair placed where a corner points at it. D: a square, which for four is a round table and for eight puts a corner at every seat. The filled circle is the host’s seat, with the wall behind and the door in view. The small ghosted arrows in C and D are the corners the tradition reads as pointing at whoever sits in their line.

Hallways and stairs 3 drawings

Plan 01 Hall and stairs: the stair turned from the door, the corridor lit and interrupted The front door opens at the bottom. The stair (solid) rises from the side and turns; the ghosted stair landing straight at the door is the one the tradition reads as qi running up and out. The corridor to the right is long and lit at its end; a rug and a pendant break its length, and the bedroom door at its end is set off the axis. Doors facing one another across a corridor are marked as the tradition’s “arguing doors.”

Fig. 02 Four stairs, drawn in plan with the front door at the bottom of each house. A: a straight flight that lands at the door, ghosted, the arrangement the manuals name against. B: a dog-leg that turns away from the door and makes a landing. C: a spiral at the centre of the house, ghosted, the one the compass schools keep out of the middle. D: an open flight along a wall with a window at its top, which takes the light down to the hall. The arrow on each stair points up. The tradition’s objection to A is the line it makes: a flight pouring toward the door is a river running out of the house, and whoever comes in meets it head-on. B and D are the forms the drawings on this site prefer.

Fig. 03 Two flights, in section. A: a rise of seventeen centimetres and a going of twenty-seven, the proportions a foot climbs without thinking, twelve steps to a landing with a window on it, and a handrail at ninety centimetres; the pitch is a little over thirty degrees. B: a rise of twenty-two and a going of twenty-two, the steepest and shallowest the code allows, sixteen risers without a break, which is the most it allows in one flight; the pitch is forty-five degrees and the tradition’s waterfall is a fair description of what it feels like to come down it. The two flights climb about the same height. The numbers are the English code’s for a house, and most codes are close to them: rise between 150 and 220 millimetres, going at least 220, twice the rise plus the going between 550 and 700, no more than sixteen risers in a flight, a handrail between 900 and 1,000. The tradition’s dislike of the steep, dark, straight stair and its liking for the turn and the landing are the code’s rules without the numbers.

The bathroom 3 drawings

Plan 01 The bathroom: fittings out of the door’s line, a window to vent it, a door that closes The door opens at the bottom. The toilet sits on the side wall, out of the line of the door (solid); the ghosted position directly opposite the door is the one every school and every plumber dislikes. The window on the far wall carries the moisture out. What the tradition asks of the room is mostly that it be closed and dry.

Fig. 02 Two storeys cut through. Below, a kitchen with its stove, a hall with the front door, and a bedroom with the bed’s head against the party wall. Above, the bathroom drawn solid where the tradition puts it, over the hall, with its pipes gathered in one duct; and ghosted in the three places the manuals refuse: over the bed’s head, over the stove, and over the front door. The rule is a rule about what is overhead. A sleeper under a cistern, a stove under a drain and a threshold under a toilet are the three stacks every manual names; the plumber’s reason for the solid version is that the pipes are shortest and the noise is furthest from the bed.

Fig. 03 The same waste twice, cut through at the trap. On the left the fitting is in use: a few centimetres of water stand in the bend, held there because the outlet leaves above the bottom of the U, and that water is the whole of the seal between the room and the sewer. On the right the same trap after a shower nobody has used for a month, or a basin in a spare room: the water has evaporated, the bore is open end to end, and what the old manuals called the privy arriving in the room comes up the pipe. The remedy is the one the tradition already gives for its own reasons — run water into every drain, keep the plug in, the lid down and the door shut. The manuals' anxiety about drains is about qi leaving by them, not about what comes back; the site does not claim the manuals knew about traps, only that the practice they arrived at is the practice that works. A domestic trap holds about fifty millimetres of water. The drawing is a section, not to scale, and shows one fitting: a floor gully, a shower and a washing machine standpipe all carry the same seal and all dry out the same way.

The children’s room 3 drawings

Plan 01 A child’s room: the bed in command, the desk with its back covered, and floor left open Bed against the solid wall, head away from the window, door in view (solid). Desk with the wall behind the chair and the window to its side. Shelving on the door wall, where it does not overhang the bed. The ghosted bed under the window is the arrangement the tradition avoids and the one that keeps the child awake in summer.

Fig. 02 Two children, one room. A: both beds with their heads to the same solid wall and a table between, so that each child has the wall behind and the door in view and neither is in the other’s line. B: an L, with the heads in two corners and the feet toward the middle of the room, which gives each bed its own wall and both the door. C, ghosted: beds end to end along one wall, with one child’s feet to the door and the other’s head at the door’s side, the arrangement the manuals redraw first. The heavy line on each bed is the headboard. In every plan the door is at the bottom and the heads are away from it; the difference is whether each child gets a wall of their own.

Fig. 03 One room, replanned twice and never rebuilt. Under two the cot stands along a long wall, where a parent can reach it and the child can see the door, and it is the one bed in the house the tradition allows against a wall on its side. At three the first bed takes the command position on the right-hand wall — head to the solid wall, the door in view from the pillow, out of the door's line — and keeps it for the rest of the child's time in the room; the desk arrives at six or seven on the wall by the door, with the wall behind the chair and the window to its side. At twelve nothing moves but the desk, which gets bigger, and the wardrobe, which takes the door wall. The right-hand wall is ghosted in the first panel because it is already spoken for. The room, the door and the window are the ones the child's room plan draws, at half the size, so the two are the same room. The mistake the drawing argues against is to give the bed's wall to shelving or a wardrobe while the child is small: the cot does not need that wall and the bed will, and a wardrobe moved at ten is a wardrobe bought twice. Evans finds that a child's own place in a shared room — a corner, a bed with a curtain, a desk nobody else uses — softens the effects of crowding, which is the same rule read from the other end.

Guides

Bed placement 2 drawings

Plan 01 The command position, and the two positions the tradition avoids A, solid: the head against a solid wall, the door in view from the pillow and the bed out of the door’s line. This is the command position, and the dashed line is the sight line from the pillow to the door. B, ghosted: the feet in line with the door, inside the hatched strip, the arrangement the manuals call the coffin position after the way a body is carried out. C, ghosted: the head under the window, with glass instead of wall behind it and the draught and the street at the pillow.

Fig. 02 Four bedrooms without the ideal position. A: the door and the window on facing walls, so the bed takes the third wall, diagonal to the door and out of the window’s draught. B: a long narrow room, in which the bed lies along the long wall with its head at the end away from the door and a chest at its foot to close the line. C: a bed that must go under the window, given a tall solid headboard and curtains that close, so that the wall is made rather than found. D: a bedroom with an en-suite, in which the bed sits off the bathroom door’s line and the ghosted bed shows the one in it. In each room the door is at the bottom and the dashed line is the sleeper’s view of it. The tradition’s three conditions, wall behind, door in view, not in its line, are met as far as the room allows, and the drawing shows which one had to give.

The mirror facing the bed 3 drawings

Fig. 01 What a mirror reflects, in two plans with the door at the bottom. A: the mirror on the wall opposite the foot of the bed returns the whole bed to anyone lying in it, which is the placement every school refuses; the grey cone is what the sleeper sees. B: the same mirror moved to the side wall, where the sleeper sees nothing of the bed and the mirror reflects the window and the door instead, which is what the tradition wants a bedroom mirror to do. The rays are drawn the way a physics lesson draws them: from the eye at the pillow to the glass and out again at the same angle. Where the line comes back to the bed, the bed is in the mirror; where it goes to the window, the window is.

Fig. 02 The pillow test, in section. A: a mirrored wardrobe door runs from the floor to the lintel on the wall the bed faces; a line of sight from a lying eye meets it at eye height and comes straight back, so the sleeper sees the sleeper, and the bed, ghosted beyond the glass, is in the room twice. B: the same wall, the mirror hung with its lower edge at about a metre and a half; the lowest line of sight from the pillow strikes the bottom of the glass and returns to the wall above the headboard, so the bed is out of the picture and the mirror shows plaster and ceiling. The rule reduces to a test: lie down and look; if you can see yourself, the mirror is facing the bed. The geometry is only the law of reflection: what a mirror shows from a given eye is the point that lies at the same angle on the other side of the glass. It is why mirrored wardrobe doors are the usual culprit, why a mirror hung high on the same wall is harmless, and why the test has to be made lying down, not standing.

Fig. 03 The same bedroom three times, with the switched-off television where most modern bedrooms have it, on the wall the bed faces. Dark glass reflects nearly as well as silvered glass in a dim room, and in the first panel the screen returns the window, the bedside lamp and the bed itself to the pillow, which is the mirror the tradition’s rule is about, with a standby light added. The second panel shuts it in a cabinet with doors, or under a cloth at night, which is the classical remedy for a mirror that cannot be moved and works as well for a screen. The third turns it on a wall bracket by twenty degrees, so that what the pillow sees in the glass is the wardrobe and not itself: the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection, and a screen turned a little sends the room somewhere else. A phone face-up on the bedside table is the same problem at a smaller scale, and face-down is the same fix. The reflection lines are drawn as light would go, from the window and the lamp to the glass and from the glass to the pillow. Harding 2019 and Chang 2015 for what a lit screen does to sleep; the tradition’s rule for the mirror; the site’s reading of the two together.

Feng shui for better sleep 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The night, as the body keeps it, from eight in the evening to eight in the morning. The dark line is core temperature: it falls from the evening to its lowest at about four, a drop of a degree or so, and rises through the morning; sleep begins on the fall and is deepest near the bottom. The red line is melatonin, the hormone of darkness: it begins to rise a couple of hours before the usual bedtime, if the evening is dim, peaks in the small hours and is gone by breakfast; light in the evening delays and flattens it, and light in the morning ends it. The marks on the hours are the bedroom’s part: lamps down and the overhead light off at nine, the screen out of the room at half past, the room dark and cool by eleven, the coldest hour slept through, and the curtains open at seven, when the body wants the light that sets the next night’s clock. The tradition’s yin room, dark, cool, quiet and used for one thing, is the room in which both lines run as drawn. The curves are schematic and follow the shapes in Gooley, Chang, Harding and Wright; the hours are for a person who sleeps from eleven to seven, and shift with the sleeper. The temperature drop is about one degree in the core; the eighteen degrees is the room, not the body.

Plan 02 The bedroom drawn for sleep: dark, cool and quiet, the bed on the wall away from the street, and work and screens out The street runs along the left of the plan. The bed has its head to the far wall, away from the noise, the door in view and nothing over it. The window has curtains that close. The lamp is low and at the bedside. The ghosted screen and the ghosted desk are the two things the sleep research and the tradition both want out of the room, or at least dark at night.

Fig. 03 The bedroom at night, drawn face-on. The curtains are closed over the window and overlap it; the door is shut; the lamp at the side is off, and the bed is in the dark it was made for. Ghosted, the three lights that most bedrooms keep: the standby light on a screen at the foot of the bed, the phone lit on the bedside table, and the landing light coming under the door. The tradition’s rule is that no light should fall on the sleeper; the research’s is that even a little does something. Dark is the one rule about bedrooms on which the manuals and the sleep laboratories agree without translation. The three ghosted lights are small; the studies on bedroom light at night find that small is enough.

Front door feng shui 3 drawings

Fig. 01 Four things outside a front door, drawn in plan with the house wall at the top, the door in it, and the street below. A: a road running straight at the door, the T-junction the manuals name first, with a hedge across the front and the path bent to meet it. B: a door facing a neighbour’s door across a narrow lane, with a screen or a plant beside one of them. C: the corner of the building opposite pointing at the door, with planting in its line. D: a lamp post or a tree on the door’s axis, with the path moved to one side. The ghosted arrow is the line the tradition reads as an arrow. None of the four can usually be removed; each can be interrupted, and the drawings show the interruption the manuals recommend, which is also what a landscape designer would draw.

Plan 02 The threshold: the bright hall, and the line through the house The front door opens at the bottom onto a clear floor, the ming tang. Straight ahead, a window on the far wall makes a line through the house; the tradition reads it as qi entering and leaving without stopping. A console and a rug (solid) turn the line; the ghosted coat rack a step inside the door is the blockage the tradition asks to remove.

Fig. 03 The Lu Ban ruler, the carpenter’s measure: forty-two point nine centimetres divided into eight, wealth, illness, parting, justice, office, robbery, harm and root, four auspicious and four not, repeating along the tape. A door was sized so that its clear opening fell in an auspicious segment, and so were a bed, a table and a coffin. Four common door widths are marked where they fall on the scale: the 762 millimetre door of a small English house falls in harm; the 813 and the 838, the common internal and front door sizes, fall in root; the 914 falls in illness. A hand’s breadth moves a door from one segment to the next, and whether the measure is taken across the clear opening or the frame varies by manual, which is why the carpenters kept the ruler and let the theory look after itself. The names and the length follow Ruitenbeek’s study of the Lu Ban jing, the fifteenth-century carpenters’ manual, and the scale is still printed, in red for the auspicious segments and black for the others, on tape measures sold in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The ruler for the yin house, the Ding Lan ruler of 38.8 centimetres in ten, is not drawn.

Desk placement 3 drawings

Fig. 02 Which side the window goes, for a person who writes. Seen from above, a right-handed writer at a desk with the window on the left, A, and on the right, B; the light crosses the desk from the window and the writing hand throws its shadow away from it. In A the shadow falls to the right of the hand, off the page, and the line being written is lit. In B it falls to the left, onto the words just written, and the writer works in the shadow of their own hand. The tradition’s scholar sat with the window on the left, and the desks in the Ming studio manuals stand that way; a left-handed writer reverses the drawing, and a person at a screen, who throws no shadow that matters, keeps only the rule that the window should be at the side and not behind the screen or the chair. The light is drawn as if from a low window, which is when the shadow is longest; at midday from a high one the shadow shortens and the difference matters less. The rule is older than the screen and survives it: a desk at right angles to the window, the writing hand on the far side from the glass.

Fig. 03 Four desks that are not in a study. A: in a bedroom, the desk beside the bed rather than facing it. B: a living-room corner turned to face the room. C: two desks side by side rather than face to face. D: a desk that had faced the window, turned so the light comes from the side. In each room the door is at the bottom left; the solid desk has a wall behind the chair and the door in view, and the dashed line is its view of the door. The ghosted arrangements are the ones the room first suggests.

Sofa placement 4 drawings

Plan 01 The main seat: back to the wall, door in view, the other seats closing a circle The sofa (solid) has the solid wall behind it and sees the door; two armchairs close a circle of about three metres without turning their backs to the door, and the screen sits on a side wall where the seated eye can find it without the room being arranged around it. The ghosted sofa floating with its back to the door is the arrangement most open-plan rooms produce.

Plan 02 The sitting circle, with its distances The main sofa on the wall opposite the door, which it sees without being in its line; two armchairs turned in at the sides; the low table forty-five centimetres from the sofa’s seat, close enough to reach a cup and far enough to pass; the seats within three metres of one another across it, the distance Hall gives for talk that does not become address; a route ninety centimetres wide from the door behind the chairs, so that nobody crosses the circle to reach the rest of the room; and the screen on the side wall, within thirty degrees of the main seat’s line of sight, the dashed line, and to one side of the others’. The middle of the circle is kept open. The distances are the interior planners’ and Hall’s; the arrangement is the tradition’s hall.

Fig. 03 Hall’s four distances, drawn in plan around one seated person, with the sitting circle’s seats set in them. Hall measured how far apart Americans of the 1960s put themselves for each kind of exchange and found four bands: the intimate distance, to about forty-five centimetres, for touch and a whisper; the personal, to about a metre and twenty, an arm’s length, the distance of a conversation between two; the social, from there to about three metres sixty, split into a near half, where people talk at an ordinary volume, and a far half, where a desk usually stands between them and the voice rises; and the public beyond. The tradition’s rule for the sitting circle, seats close enough to talk across without raising the voice and far enough not to touch, is the near social band, and the four seats in the drawing stand in it, a metre and a half to two metres apart across the circle; a sofa and two chairs that close a circle of that size make the room the tradition and Hall both describe. Seats beyond the band, along the walls of a large room, put every conversation in the far social distance, which is why a big living room needs two circles rather than one wide one. Hall 1966 for the distances, measured on North Americans and varying by culture; the tradition’s phrasing is the manuals’ and Rossbach’s. The bands are drawn to scale at forty units to the metre.

Fig. 04 Three sofas, drawn in section, and what stands behind each. A: a wall, the solid support the tradition asks for behind any seat. B: a sofa floating in the room with a console table behind it at the height of its back, which makes a back where the plan gave none and holds a lamp. C: a sofa under a window, where the manuals want a high back to close the glass and a console to make the sill a shelf; the ghosted curve is the low-backed sofa the room started with. The rule is the armchair site at the scale of a seat: something solid behind the sitter’s shoulders. The wall gives it; a console at the right height gives most of it; a window gives none until something is built in front of it.

Beams and corners 4 drawings

Fig. 01 A beam over the bed, in section. Left: the bed under the beam, which crosses the sleeper at the chest, the arrangement every manual names first. Right: the bed moved so that the beam is clear of it. Where the bed cannot move, the manuals prefer the beam along the body to the beam across it, and a false ceiling, canopy or fabric to nothing. The section shows what the objection is to: the seen mass overhead, not anything structural. A beam behind plaster is no beam at all in this reading, which is why hiding it is treated as a real remedy.

Fig. 02 The remedies for a beam over the bed, in order, each a plan of the same room with the beam hatched across it. A: move the bed out from under the beam, the only remedy that changes the situation rather than its appearance; here the bed takes the side wall and the beam crosses the floor. B: turn the bed so that the beam runs along the body rather than across it, the lesser evil most small rooms allow, because a line along a sleeper is not the line over the chest the manuals single out. C: hide it, with a canopy, a tester or a false ceiling below the beam, drawn as the dashed field over the bed; the tradition treats concealment as a real mitigation and the perceptual case agrees, since what is felt is the seen mass overhead. D: the Black Sect’s cure, two bamboo flutes hung under the beam with red ribbon, drawn ghosted with the bed where it was; it is a genuine part of that school’s practice and no part of classical feng shui, which would move the bed. The room is two metres eighty-five by two and a half, the beam twenty-five centimetres wide at forty centimetres from the head wall, where a bulkhead most often falls in a converted flat. The order is the manuals’, and it is also the order of cost: A and B cost an afternoon, C a carpenter, and D nothing, which is what it does.

Fig. 03 Six ceilings the manuals lump together as a beam, each in section with a bed under it, and what the site does about each. A, the downstand: one deep structural beam across the room, the case the manuals mean and the one the bed should leave, by moving out from under it or turning so the beam runs along the body. B, exposed joists: many shallow timbers evenly spaced, which is a ceiling and not a beam, and which a sleeper reads as a texture rather than a line; the manuals themselves slept under them for two thousand years. C, the coffered ceiling, a grid of shallow beams all over, the tradition’s own ceiling in every hall it built and no fault at all. D, the sloping ceiling of an attic, low on one side, where the answer is the head to the high side and nothing else. E, the false beam, hollow timber added for the look in the last century’s cottages and pubs, which can come down in an hour or stay, since it carries nothing and the research on ceiling height finds no effect from a line that is not low. F, the boxed duct, a pipe or a flue cased in plasterboard, which is a downstand in everything but structure and is treated as one, with the extra rule that nothing that carries water or gas should run over a pillow. The research the beams guide cites, Meyers-Levy on ceiling height and Vartanian on curved and rectilinear rooms, is about the height and the shape of the whole ceiling, not about single members; the site reads the manuals’ beam as the case where a member lowers the ceiling over a sleeper by a hand or more.

Plan 04 A corner aimed at the sofa: the line of the edge, the seat moved off it, the edge softened A chimney breast projects from the left wall and its edge points across the room. The ghosted sofa sits in the line of the edge; the solid sofa is moved off it, against the top wall with the door in view, and a plant stands in front of the corner. The same drawing serves a column, the end of a partition or the corner of a tall wardrobe.

Finding your facing direction 4 drawings

Fig. 01 Which way does a house face? A: the front door opens toward the road and the facing is where the door is. B: the door is on the side of the house and the big windows and the road are elsewhere; the facing is the open, active elevation, not the door. C: a flat in a block; most teachers take the facing of the building, some the flat’s own door onto the corridor, and the two readings can differ by ninety degrees. The dashed arrow is the facing in each case. Where a house is genuinely ambiguous, as in C, the compass methods that depend on the facing, Eight Mansions and Flying Stars above all, are the methods to trust least, because a facing wrong by one sector moves every reading with it. The Form School’s reading of the same house does not change.

Plan 02 Taking the facing: three readings on the facing line, away from the wall, averaged The house faces the road at the bottom of the plan, so the facing is taken there: stand outside, back to the door, a metre or two from the wall, and read the bearing three times along the facing line. The three red dots are the three readings; average them, and the red arrow is the facing they give, which names a mountain, here S2. The sitting is the opposite point on the compass, here N2. Cars, railings, phones and the steel in the wall all move the needle, which is why the readings are taken in the open.

Fig. 03 Two norths. Stand a stick upright on level ground; at local solar noon, when the sun is highest and due south, its shadow is shortest and points to true north, the north of the map and the stars. A magnetic needle points to magnetic north, which is somewhere else, and the angle between the two is the declination. It is a degree or two in most of Europe, which a compass method can ignore; it is ten to fifteen degrees in much of North America and Australia, which is the width of a whole mountain on the luopan. The tradition’s bearings are magnetic bearings, taken with a needle; a house whose facing is read from a map or a satellite image is read in true bearings, and the two disagree by the declination of the place. The values in the table are approximate for the mid-2020s and drift by a fraction of a degree a year; a national geological survey publishes the current figure for any place. Solar noon is not twelve o’clock: it is the middle of the day between sunrise and sunset, which any weather service gives. South of the tropics the noon sun is in the north and the shadow points south; the check is the same, turned round.

Fig. 04 The void lines, drawn on the ring. The twenty-four mountains meet at twenty-four boundaries, and a facing that falls within about two degrees of one of them is a void line, kong wang, which the Compass schools read as a house they cannot chart with confidence. Eight of the boundaries are worse than the rest: the ones where a trigram changes, at twenty-two and a half degrees and every forty-five after it, drawn heavy, since a house on one of them belongs to neither of two Eight Mansions groups and neither of two Flying Star charts. The sixteen between mountains of one trigram, drawn light, are the small void lines, and the school’s charts differ across them less. The tinted bands are the two degrees either side that a careful reading treats as the line, and they add up to about a fifth of the ring: a house has roughly one chance in five of sitting on a boundary of some kind, which is why the schools have rules for it. The reading marked at ninety-seven degrees falls on the small void line between E2 and E3, and the site’s advice for it is the note’s: report it as a void line, read the house by its form, and, if a chart must be drawn, draw both and trust neither where they differ. The practitioners’ older remedy, rehanging the door a few degrees off the line, is a real one and the design note gives it. The two-degree band is a common working width, not a canonical figure; Skinner gives the void lines and the practice of reading both charts. The eight great void lines are the trigram boundaries; the ring’s first mountain opens at 337.5 degrees.

A bed for two 3 drawings

Plan 01 A bed for two: head to the wall, both sides open, the door in view from both pillows The solid bed has the wall behind its head, a clear passage on each side and a table for each sleeper, and both pillows see the door. The ghosted bed pushed into the corner is the arrangement small rooms suggest; it gives one sleeper a wall to climb over and the other the whole floor.

Fig. 02 Three bedroom widths, and what each allows a bed for two. A: a room 3.8 m wide takes a 160 bed centred on the wall with a fifty-centimetre table and sixty centimetres of floor on each side, which is the arrangement the tradition draws and the one most people want. B: a room 3.0 m wide takes the same bed centred with seventy centimetres of floor each side and no tables, so the lamps go on the wall and the books on a shelf. C: a room 2.6 m wide will not centre a 160 bed with a way out on both sides; the tradition takes a smaller bed, a 140 centred with sixty centimetres each side, rather than the 160 in the corner, ghosted, which gives one sleeper a wall and the other the whole floor. The numbers are the ordinary ones: sixty centimetres is the floor a person needs to stand beside a bed, turn, and make it; a bedside table is forty-five to fifty wide; a double bed is 140, 160 or 180 wide in most of Europe and 135, 150 or 180 in Britain. The arithmetic is the whole argument: bed plus twice the clearance, plus the tables if they are wanted, and the room either has it or does not.

Fig. 03 A bed for two, in two plans with the door at the bottom right. A: the bed centred on the wall it backs onto, a table on each side and sixty centimetres of floor beside each, so that both pillows see the door across the room and either sleeper can leave without waking the other. B, ghosted: the same bed pushed against the side wall to make room, so that one sleeper climbs over the other and one pillow has its view of the door taken by the other’s head. The tradition’s command position for one is a position for two only if the bed is centred, which is the first thing a small room takes away. The dashed lines are the two views of the door; in B one of them is not there.

"Choosing a home: reading the site" 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The five steps of a classical site reading, in the order the Form school’s manuals give them. First seek the dragon: the range of hills the site descends from, followed from its highest point down to where it settles. Second examine the sands, the lower hills at either hand that shelter the site, the dragon on the left and the tiger on the right. Third observe the water: how it arrives, whether it curves toward the site or away, where it leaves and whether the leaving is hidden. Fourth find the spot, the xue, the small place where the range settles, the sands enclose and the water gathers, on which the grave or the house is set. Fifth, and last, set the facing: the bearing, taken with the compass, of the open side. The order is the point. The compass comes after the eye has done its work, and a reading that begins with the bearing has skipped four steps. The five are the standard formula of the landform school, seek the dragon, examine the sands, observe the water, find the spot and set the facing, and the drawings are the same valley seen five times with a different thing attended to. The site is read from the largest thing to the smallest and from the given to the chosen; the yin house page draws the valley in full.

Plan 02 The street: a house off the axis of every road, and the house at the head of a T-junction Both houses face the main road. The solid house has the road passing across its front; the ghosted house sits where the side road meets the main road, so that the side road runs straight at its door; the dashed line with the red arrowhead is the road’s axis. The tradition reads the second as a road aimed at the house, the clearest exterior sha in the manuals, and the everyday reading is headlights in the front room at night and a car that fails to turn.

Plan 03 An L-shaped plan with the bagua laid over its bounding rectangle: the empty sector is the missing corner The nine sectors are drawn over the smallest rectangle that contains the plan, and the sector the building does not fill is read as missing. Here the notch takes half of the south side, so the south-west sector is missing rather than the rest of the house being an extension; the manuals put the threshold at about a third of the side. The remedy the tradition gives is to complete the shape outside, with paving, a hedge, a lamp or a tree at the missing corner.

Small apartments and studios 3 drawings

Plan 01 A studio: arrive, cook, eat and gather from the door inward, and the bed in command behind a curtain The room is read as the whole house in one span. The door end is the yang end: a place to arrive, the kitchen along the near wall, the table where the light reaches it. The far end is the yin end: the bed with its head to the solid wall, out of the door’s line but able to see it, and a curtain that makes it a room at night. Storage goes up the walls, not across the floor.

Plan 02 The clearances: what a studio needs between its things A studio of seven by four metres, with the distances that let it be crossed. The door’s swing is kept clear, a mat and nothing else in it. The main route, ninety centimetres wide, runs from the door to the window without a turn through anything; the tradition’s bending path is a luxury a studio cannot afford, and it settles for a straight one that is not blocked. Sixty centimetres beside the bed and behind a pulled-out chair is the least a person passes through; seventy-five is what a chair needs to be pulled from a table; a hundred and twenty in front of a worktop lets a cupboard open with someone standing at it. The dimensions are the designers’ minimums, from Panero and Zelnik; the tradition adds only that the floor between them stay a floor.

Fig. 03 A studio cut through. The window is at the left end and the desk stands under it: the yang end, where the work is. The bed is at the right end against the far wall: the yin end, where the sleep is. Between them the floor is open, because the storage has gone up the back wall to the ceiling instead of across the room. The ghosted chests are what most studios do instead, and what breaks the floor into paths. The tradition asks for the room in an order, light to dark, work to rest, and for a floor that stays a floor. In a room with one window the order draws itself; the floor is the decision, and it is made by the height of the storage.

Lighting 3 drawings

Plan 01 Light in a living room: pools of light where people are, and none in the middle of the ceiling Daylight falls off from the window on the right. The lamps are placed where the tradition wants light: over the table, beside the main seat, in the corner that daylight never reaches, and at the door where a person arrives. The ghosted single ceiling light in the middle of the room is the fitting most rooms are handed and the one that lights nothing in particular.

Fig. 02 The five lamps of the tradition’s room at the heights the designer gives, drawn in section against the three eye lines: a lying eye at about sixty-five centimetres, a seated eye at about a hundred and fifteen, a standing eye at about a hundred and sixty. The rule under all five is one rule: the bottom of the shade at or just below the eye of the person the lamp is for, so that the bulb is hidden and the light falls on the lap, the page, the food and the faces and not into anyone’s eyes. The pendant over the table hangs with its shade seventy-five centimetres above the top, which is below a standing guest’s eye and above a seated one’s; the lamp beside a seat has its shade at the seated eye; the lamp beside a bed is lower again, at the lying eye, with the switch within reach of a lying hand; the floor lamp in a corner has its shade at a hundred and fifty, above the seated eye and below the standing one, so that it lights the corner and not the room; and the light at the door is high, to light the floor and the faces of those arriving. A bare bulb at the height of any of the three eyes is the tradition’s sha of light, a point aimed at a person. The heights are the ones interior designers use and Boyce 2014 gives the reasons for, the eye’s sensitivity to a bright point in a dim field and the loss of contrast with age. The tradition places lamps by where people are and never gave heights; these are the heights its placings imply.

Fig. 03 Colour temperature, from a candle to an overcast sky, drawn as the tradition reads the day: the warm, dim end is yin and belongs to the evening and the bedroom, the cool, bright end is yang and belongs to the morning and the desk. Bulbs are sold by this number. Below about 2700 kelvin, dimmed, is what the sleep research allows in a bedroom after dusk; 4000 and above is daylight’s territory and belongs where work is done, in the daytime. The tradition’s Fire and Water, warm and cool, sit at the two ends.

Colour by element 5 drawings

Fig. 01 The five correct colours, in the order the Han scheme gives them: qing, the green-blue of growing things, for Wood, the east and spring; red for Fire, the south and summer; yellow for Earth, the centre and the turn of the year; white for Metal, the west and autumn; black for Water, the north and winter. The swatch is the strong colour and the tint beneath it the quiet one, which is the pair the site uses for each element. Under each the family the practitioner manuals widened it into in the twentieth century, when the scheme was first applied to paint. The five are the zheng se, the correct colours; everything mixed from them was a jian se, an intermediate colour, and Confucius, in the Analects, is recorded hating the purple of his day for usurping the place of vermilion. Qing is the colour that will not translate: the word covers the green of leaves, the blue of a clear sky and the black of a horse’s coat, because it names the colour of what grows and deepens rather than a wavelength. The manuals split it into greens for Wood and blues for Water, which is a modern division of an old word.

Fig. 02 The eight directions with the element the compass gives each, and the colours the practitioner manuals attach to the element. North is up; the centre is Earth. The correspondences between the Five Phases, the directions and the five colours are Han-dynasty cosmology and older; their application to paint and upholstery is a practitioner adaptation of the last century. The tints here are the site’s own for each element and stand for a family of colours, not a single one.

Fig. 03 What colour has been shown to do, as a ledger. Five studies, from the one large field study of real rooms to the review that weighs the rest. Küller and colleagues followed nearly a thousand office workers in four countries through a year and found that mood tracked the light more than the colour, with a small effect of the rooms’ colourfulness and a low point where they were felt to be too dark: the study that puts light before paint. Elliot and colleagues found that a glimpse of red on a test paper lowered the score, an effect the subjects were not aware of; Hill and Barton found the red side winning more of the evenly matched bouts at the 2004 Olympic Games, where the colour was assigned by lot; Mehta and Zhu found red backgrounds better for detail and proofreading and blue for open, creative tasks. Elliot and Maier’s review finds these the effects that survive, small and bound to their settings, and finds no study at all behind the decorating claims, that a colour on a wall brings wealth, calm or love. The last column is what each study supports in a house: light before paint, a little less red at a desk where errors matter, and nothing from the paperbacks. Sizes as reported; the six-experiment papers pooled several hundred students each. The contest and test-paper findings have been partly replicated and partly not, which the review discusses; the site records them as small effects, not as rules.

Fig. 04 Eight rooms and their palettes, in proportion. Each bar is a room; the width of each part is how much of the room’s surface a phase takes, and its colour is the strength the tradition gives it. The large parts are the muted tints, walls, floors and fabrics; the narrow parts are the full colour, a lamp, a cushion, a stove, a single object. The drawing is the rule of proportion made visible: the phase that leads a room takes most of it in a quiet form, and the phase that corrects it takes a little in a strong one. The colours are the site’s five element tints and tones. Proportions are a reading, not a specification.

Mirrors 3 drawings

Fig. 01 Three mirrors and one person, drawn face-on. A: a mirror whose top is above the tallest head in the house, so that everyone sees themselves whole with air above; the height the manuals ask for. B, ghosted: a mirror hung so that its top edge crosses the head, which the manuals read as cutting it and which the eye, less dramatically, reads as a mirror hung too low. C, ghosted: a wall of mirror tiles, which shows a body in pieces; the manuals refuse them for the same reason they refuse cracked glass. The rule of height is the one rule about mirrors that every school shares, and the one most often broken by a mirror bought for a wall it does not fit. A mirror should show the whole head of the tallest person with a hand’s breadth above it, and the whole body where it is meant to.

Plan 02 Mirrors in a flat: on the side wall of the hall, opposite the window, inside the wardrobe door; not facing the door, the bed or each other Solid mirrors are the placements the tradition allows: along the side wall of a narrow hall, on the wall opposite a window so that the room gets the light twice, and inside a wardrobe door where it is seen only when wanted. Ghosted mirrors are the ones every manual names: facing the front door, facing the bed, and facing another mirror across a hall.

Fig. 03 The three bagua mirrors, in plan, with a line arriving from the upper left and leaving as the glass dictates. A: a flat mirror sends the line back at the angle it came, which is the tradition’s reflect-it-back, and is hung to face the thing it answers. B: a convex mirror, the common kind sold with the trigrams round it, scatters what reaches it, so that a line arriving as one leaves as three; the tradition reads it as dispersing the sha rather than returning it, and it is the one most manuals recommend over a door. C: a concave mirror gathers what reaches it to a point before it spreads again, and the schools that use it hang it to draw something in, a view or a water; it is rare, and the site does not recommend it, since a mirror that gathers gathers whatever is there. The reflections are computed from the curvature, not drawn by eye: the rays obey the ordinary law of reflection, and the tradition’s three uses are what the three geometries actually do to light. All three belong outside; the one flat mirror the tradition allows indoors is the plain domestic one, without the trigrams.

Plants 3 drawings

Plan 01 Where plants go: the dark corner, beside the seat, in front of the edge, and out of the door’s line Solid plants, each with a red centre, stand where the tradition wants them: in the corner daylight does not reach, beside the main seat, in front of the chimney breast’s edge so that it no longer points at the sofa, and at the far corner of the room. Ghosted plants stand where it does not: in the line of the door, where they are in the way of everything that enters, and beside the bed, where the manuals prefer nothing living and the sleeper prefers nothing to knock over.

Fig. 02 Four plants the manuals sort by shape, drawn beside a chair. A: broad, rounded leaves, the generous form of Wood, which may stand anywhere and beside the seat. B: spiked and pointed leaves, read as small sha; they belong at a window or a boundary, where a guard is wanted, and the ghosted one beside the chair is the one the manuals move. C: a trailing plant, read as sinking, kept off the entrance and from over a seat; solid on a shelf away from the chair, ghosted where it hangs over it. D: dried stems, which the tradition reads as dead and sends out. The sorting is the manuals’, not the botanist’s. What it comes to is a rule about points and lines near a body at rest: nothing sharp at eye level beside a seat, nothing hanging over a head, and nothing in the room that is not alive.

Fig. 03 The plants the classical house kept, which are the ones the treatises name and none of the ones the shops sell. The three friends of winter come first: the pine, which stays green through the cold and was read as constancy; the bamboo, hollow, jointed and unbroken by snow, read as uprightness; and the plum, which flowers on bare wood in the cold, read as endurance. Then the scholar’s two flowers, the orchid, which the Confucian tradition made the gentleman’s emblem for its scent without display, and the chrysanthemum, the autumn flower of Tao Yuanming, who picked it by the east fence and stood for the retired official ever after. And the lotus, clean out of the mud, kept in a glazed jar in the courtyard. Wen Zhenheng’s treatise of the 1620s, which Clunas reads for the taste of the Ming gentleman, gives them chapter by chapter and where each belongs: the pine and the plum outside and old, the bamboo where its shadow falls on the window paper, the orchid on the desk in a plain pot, the chrysanthemum in rows with the pots hidden, the lotus in the sun. None of them is a cure. They were kept for the eye and for what they said about the keeper. Wen Zhenheng, Zhang wu zhi, c. 1620–1627, in Clunas 1991; the readings are the literary ones every schoolchild learned. The glyphs are the site’s and not botanical drawings.

Water features 3 drawings

Plan 01 Water: in front of the house and to its left as it looks out; not behind it, not in the bedroom, not beside the stove The house faces the road at the bottom. The solid pond sits in front of the house on the dragon side, the house’s left as it looks out, which is the right of a north-up plan; a small bowl or fountain, the red mark, stands inside the entrance to the side of the door. The ghosted water is where every manual objects: behind the house, in the bedroom, and beside the stove, where Water and Fire meet.

Fig. 02 Three shapes of water, read from the house. A: a river that bends round the site with its belly toward the house holds the house in its curve, which the tradition reads as qi gathered and the Form School calls the jade belt; the house faces it. B: the same river with its back to the house, the reverse bow, which the tradition reads as water turning away and lists among the sha, the faults; the current runs at the bank the house stands on. C, ghosted and solid: a swimming pool behind the house with a corner pointed at it, the shape most suburban pools take, against the rounded pool the manuals accept, with planting between it and the house so that the water is not at the tortoise’s back. The shapes are the Shuilong Jing’s, the Water Dragon Classic, which reads rivers on the plains where there are no hills, and they are the same shapes the road pages read: a road that embraces and a road that cuts are the river’s bend twice over. The pool is the modern case; the manuals’ objection to water behind the house is older than the pool and does not change for it.

Fig. 03 Water indoors, in four small plans with the door at the bottom of each. A: a bowl or a small fountain inside the front door, to one side of it and out of its line, the classical placement. B: a tank in the living room against a solid wall, where the seats can see it. C, ghosted: a tank in the bedroom, beside the bed, which the manuals refuse for the room’s sake and the sleeper’s. D, ghosted: a tank beside the stove, Water against Fire on one worktop, the placement every edition refuses. The ripple marks water. The two good placements are the two rooms where people arrive and gather; the two refused are the room where they sleep and the one where they cook. Clean, moving or fresh, and modest, in every case.

Windows 3 drawings

Plan 01 Windows: the axis from the door to the window opposite, and the seat, the desk and the bed kept off it The window opposite the door makes a line through the room, drawn dashed with a red arrowhead at the window: the tradition reads it as qi entering and leaving at once, and the body reads it as a draught. Nothing that a person sits or sleeps in stands on it, and the ghosted sofa across the axis is the arrangement the line is drawn against: the desk takes the side window for its light, the seat backs onto the solid wall, and the bed lies across the room with its head to the wall and the window to its side. Curtains are drawn as the tradition wants them, able to close the window at night.

Fig. 02 Three sills, in section, the window wall at the left and the outside beyond it; the people sit facing into the room with the window at their side. A: a sill at thirty-five centimetres, low enough to sit on with a cushion, makes a window place, the seat in the light that Alexander’s pattern asks every room with a view to have; the seated eye is well above the sill and the whole view is there. B: a sill at ninety, the ordinary height, with a desk beside the window rather than under it; the seated eye at a metre fifteen sees over the sill, and the light comes from the side, which is where the tradition and the desk both want it. C: a sill at a metre fifty above the head of a bed, the one arrangement in which the tradition tolerates a window behind a sleeper, because the wall behind the pillow is wall to above the head and the glass is where no one lies or looks. Below the line of the sleeper it is a bed against a wall; above it, a high window that lights the room without watching the bed. The heights are Alexander’s low sill, thirty to forty centimetres for a window place, and the common building sill of ninety; a sill above a bed head should clear the top of the headboard and the pillow with a hand’s breadth to spare. A window whose sill is below the seated eye gives a view to a person at a desk or a table, and one whose sill is above it gives light only, which is the whole difference between a window one sits beside and a window one sits under.

Fig. 03 Two rooms and the air in them. A: windows on two walls, one open on each, and the air crosses the room from one to the other; the room changes its air in minutes. B, ghosted: one window, and the air that comes in turns back at the far wall and leaves by the way it came, so that the middle of the room keeps what it had. Opening the door as well gives the second room two ends. The tradition’s morning rule, open the windows, is a rule about cross-ventilation whether or not the manuals knew the word. Two openings on different walls, or a window and an open door, are what move the air; one window on its own mostly moves the curtain.

Clutter and order 4 drawings

Fig. 01 The same room twice, with the same things in it. Left: the things on the floor, in the way of every path from the door to the window, the seat and the bed. Right: the things on shelves up the walls, the floor open, and the paths clear. The tradition reads the first room as a room where qi cannot move and the second as a room where it can. The housing research reads the first as clutter and the second as a sense of home. The number of objects is the same; only their height has changed.

Fig. 02 Where things live, by height. The floor is the room’s ground and the tradition wants it empty. Below the waist, closed cupboards hold what is used seldom, so that the room does not show it. At waist height, a shelf or a surface holds what is used every day, where a hand reaches without bending. At eye height, open shelves hold what is worth looking at, the books and the few objects, which is what a room is seen as. Above the head, what is kept and rarely wanted. The bands are Alexander’s patterns for open shelves and the waist-high shelf, and the tradition’s rule about the floor drawn on the wall the things go up. The rule of thumb behind the drawing: a thing on the floor occupies the room, a thing on a wall occupies the wall. Storage that goes up rather than across is the whole of the tradition’s advice on clutter, and the heights say which things go where. The figure is 1.7 m tall; the waist-high shelf is at about 0.9 to 1.1 m, the eye between 1.5 and 1.7.

Fig. 03 What the research has found about clutter and order, as a ledger. Saxbe and Repetti filmed thirty couples showing their homes and sampled their saliva through the day: the people who used the words cluttered and unfinished had the flatter cortisol rhythm of chronic stress and the lower mood, the women more than the men. Roster, Ferrari and Jurkat surveyed fourteen hundred adults and found clutter going with a weaker sense of home and with putting things off. McMains and Kastner watched the brain attend to one object among several and found the others suppressing it, which is the mechanism behind the tradition’s clear desk. Vohs, Redden and Rahinel put people to tasks in an orderly and a disordered room and found the orderly room favouring healthy choices and generosity and the disordered one favouring new ideas, which is the one result on the ledger that speaks for a little mess. Evans’s review gives the frame: a sense of control over one’s space is what protects, and clutter is the loss of it. The last column is what each supports in the tradition’s terms, and the first row’s is the important one: the clutter that mattered was the clutter the people themselves named. Sizes as reported. The first two studies are correlational and say nothing about cause; the third and fourth are experimental and small. Vohs 2013 in Psychological Science; McMains and Kastner 2011 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Plan 04 The five places clutter lands, and the tradition clears first: the door’s swing, the path, under the bed, the sills, the surfaces at eye height Hatched, the five zones. One, the quarter-circle the front door needs to open all the way. Two, the path from the door to the window at the end of the corridor, the line the tradition wants clear. Three, the floor under the bed. Four, the window sills, where things are set down to be dealt with later. Five, the table and the worktop, the surfaces a room is seen as. Everything else in the plan can hold what the household wants; these five cannot.

Rented homes 3 drawings

Plan 01 A rented flat: what is fixed and what the tenant can move The walls, the windows, the front door, the kitchen and the bathroom are the landlord’s and are drawn faint. Everything drawn solid can be moved without permission: the bed into its command position, the desk to the side of the window, the sofa against a wall, a folding screen where a wall is wanted, a mirror on the side wall, lamps in the corners and a plant in front of the column. The tradition’s rules for a rented home are the same as for any other; only the list of remedies is shorter.

Fig. 02 Four things a tenant can do without a drill, drawn face-on. A: a curtain on a tension rod, wedged between two reveals across a window or across the line from the door. B: a folding screen, three panels that stand on the floor and make a wall behind a seat or across a corridor’s end. C: a floor lamp, plugged in, in the corner daylight does not reach. D: a rug, which makes a floor under a seating group and gives the seats a ground of their own. Everything in the tradition’s first rules can be done with things that stand, hang from a rod or plug in. The four here answer, in order, the through-house, the missing wall, the dark corner and the floor that is not a floor.

1The door: which way it opens, what its line meets · 2 The facing, taken at the main window with the phone
3The bed’s wall: a solid wall the head can go to, a door seen from it · 4 The window: what it faces, and how far off
5The stove: where it stands, what is over it · 6 The bathroom door: not onto the bed or the table
7The party wall: a hand on it, and a minute’s silence · 8 The light: which rooms have it at this hour

Plan 03 The viewing, in ten minutes A one-bedroom flat with the route a tenant walks at a viewing and the eight stops the lease cannot change, in the order they come. The door first, which way it opens and what its line meets, since a door onto a corridor’s end or straight through to a window is a fault no curtain fully mends; the facing second, taken at the main window with the phone’s compass, because the finding your facing direction guide’s number is the one the compass schools need and a viewing is when to take it. The bedroom third, for the one thing it must have, a solid wall the head can go to with the door seen from it; the window fourth, for what it faces and at what distance, which the outside guide reads. The kitchen’s stove fifth, since it cannot be moved, and the bathroom’s door sixth, which should not open onto the bed or the table. Then the two things a plan does not show: a hand on the party wall and a minute’s silence for the neighbours, and the light, noted for the hour of the viewing so that a flat seen at noon is not taken for a bright one. A flat that passes six of the eight is a flat the tenant’s toolkit can finish; a flat that fails the door, the bed’s wall or the noise is a flat to leave.

Workplaces 5 drawings

Fig. 01 The till, twice, in a shop of five metres by four with its door and window on the street. A: the counter where the commercial manuals put it, on the side wall toward the back, so that the person at it sees the door and the whole shop without standing in the door’s line, has a solid wall behind, and has the floor of the shop, the bright hall, in front; the customer arrives across the open floor and the goods are between the door and the till. B: the counter where most shops put it, just inside the door with its back to the window, so that the person at it has the street behind them, cannot see who comes in without turning, and stands in the line from the door to the back of the shop; the manuals read it as the mouth of the business blocked and the till exposed, and the retailer reads it as a counter that gets in the way of the door and a back to the pavement. The tradition’s till is the command position with a cash drawer. The arrangement is the one Emmons’s Hong Kong shopkeepers described consulting a geomancer for, and the one Bruun records in the commercial manuals: the till off the door’s line, backed, and seeing the door, with water or a plant between it and the entrance if the school allows. Scale 40 units to the metre.

Plan 02 An office: reception seeing the door, desks with a wall or a screen behind, the corner office in command, the meeting room with a host’s seat The entrance is at the bottom left and reception faces it. The desks along the left are backed by the wall or by a screen between the pairs, with the windows at their side; the three red-centred circles are the plants that break the aisle. The corner office at the top right has the wall behind its chair and the door in view, which is what the phrase corner office has always meant. The meeting room’s host sits with the wall behind and the door in view. The ghosted row of desks along the bottom faces the aisle with the door at its back, the arrangement open-plan offices produce by default.

Fig. 03 Two desks in one room, in three plans with the door at the bottom. A: back to back with a screen between the chairs, so that each sitter has something solid behind and both see the door at an angle. B: side by side against one wall, the pair the manuals draw for a shared study, with the door in view of both. C, ghosted: face to face across the room, which puts each person in the other’s line of sight all day and leaves both backs open to the room. The rule for two desks is the rule for one, applied twice without either breaking the other’s. A and B satisfy it; C is what an office produces when two desks are pushed together, and what the seating research calls the confrontation position.

Fig. 04 The open-plan studies, as a ledger. Five findings about rooms in which nobody has a wall. Bernstein and Turban fitted the staff of two firms with sensors before and after their move to open plan and found face-to-face interaction falling by about seventy per cent, with email and messaging rising to replace it: the room built for talk produced less of it. Kim and de Dear’s post-occupancy surveys, across more than forty thousand workers and three hundred buildings, found open-plan workers the least satisfied with sound privacy and noise and found none of the promised gain in interaction. Banbury and Berry found overheard conversation the sound that disturbs most, and found that people do not get used to it. Evans and Johnson put clerical workers in three hours of ordinary open-office noise and measured raised stress hormones, fewer attempts at hard problems and fewer changes of posture. Sommer, forty years earlier, watched where people sit when they can choose and found them taking the wall behind and the view of the room, and defending the seat. The last column is what each supports in the tradition’s terms: walls down, talk down; noise and privacy before decoration; speech the enemy, not the machines; a quiet desk a working desk; and the command position, observed in the wild before anyone wrote it on a plan. Sizes as reported. Bernstein and Turban 2018 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B; Kim and de Dear 2013 in the Journal of Environmental Psychology; Banbury and Berry 2005 in Ergonomics; Evans and Johnson 2000 in the Journal of Applied Psychology; Sommer 1969, Personal Space.

1Best · a wall behind, the door seen at a diagonal, the window at the side
2Good · a wall behind and the door in view; the light from the front, a blind needed
3Poor · the back to the aisle or the light straight ahead; a screen or a turn of the chair mends one
4Worst · the back to the door’s line or under the vent, facing a wall; refuse it, or bring the screen

Plan 05 Choosing a desk in an open plan An open-plan floor of twelve by nine metres with twelve desks, the door at the south-west corner, the window wall to the east, the aisle down the middle and the meeting room in the north-west; the desks are graded by the three conditions the tradition and the research agree on, a wall behind, the door in view, the light from the side, with the vent marked because the research adds it. The best two desks are the north-east pair: the wall behind, the door seen across the room at a diagonal, the window at the side, and out of the door’s line. The north-west pair keep the wall and the door but face the light. The middle island has no wall on either side, which the screen between the pairs partly mends, and the south row sits with its back to the aisle and its face to a wall, which is the command position inverted; the two desks in the door’s line and the one under the vent are the room’s worst, and a person who can choose should choose anything else. A person who cannot choose has the workplaces guide’s toolkit: a screen, a turn of the chair, a lamp and, for the vent, a word with facilities.

Art, images and objects 3 drawings

Fig. 01 Two walls of one room, drawn face-on. Left, the wall behind the main seat: a picture of something solid, hills or a building, hung so that its centre is at the eye of a standing person and the seat sits under it like a site under its hill. Right, the wall the seat faces: a picture with depth in it, water, a path, a distance, hung a little lower so that it is seen from the seat. The ghosted picture is hung where most are, too high, and the ghosted object is the pointed thing the tradition keeps away from where people sit. The rule is the Form School’s site turned into pictures: mountain behind, water in front. The heights are the gallery’s: the centre of a picture at about 1.5 m from the floor for a standing viewer, lower where it is seen sitting down.

Fig. 02 One wall, four seasons. The Ming connoisseurs hung one scroll at a time and changed it: plum or orchid in spring, lotus or bamboo in summer, chrysanthemum in autumn, pine or a snow scene in winter, with the table beneath carrying one thing that answered it, a bronze, a stone, a branch in a vase. Wen Zhenheng’s treatise gives the rule and the calendar, and Clunas reads it as the whole theory of the Ming interior: a room shows one thing, and the thing changes. The fifth wall is the one the practice was against, everything the household owned hung at once, drawn ghosted, and it is the wall most rooms have now. The tradition’s rule for pictures and objects descends from the four walls, not the fifth: what is hung is chosen, it is one thing or a few, and it is allowed to change. The subjects are the conventional ones, the four gentlemen of the literati garden, plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum, with the pine of winter; the calendar varied by household and the rule did not. A scroll was hung with its centre a little above the eye and taken down before it was tired of.

Plan 03 Where the classical objects go, and where the shop’s do not Seven numbers on one living room. The classical list is short and every item on it does a job the plan can see: a screen stands in for a missing wall a step inside the door; plants bring Wood to the dark corner and stand beside the seat; a heavy pot gives the entrance weight; a lamp gives the dark corner light; water is outside and in front, where the seat can see it; and the sharp thing is cased on a wall it cannot point from. Ghosted, where the shop puts its objects: the toad beside the door facing in, the crystal in the window, the chime over the threshold. None of the three is in a classical text, and the room is the same with or without them.

Levels, ceilings and floors 4 drawings

Fig. 01 A house cut through. On the left, a living room half a metre below the main floor: the tradition reads a step down as a pool, and a sunken room as a place where qi settles, which suits a room for sitting and not a room for sleeping. In the middle, the main level and its stair. On the right, a loft under a sloping roof over the kitchen, with the bed under the high side of the ceiling and off the stove’s line, and a ghosted bed under the eave and over the stove, where the manuals will not put a sleeper. Below, a basement: below ground, dark and yin, which the tradition keeps for storage and the research keeps for anything but sleep. Heights are the usual ones: 2.4 m for the main rooms, 2.9 m in the sunken room because the floor dropped, and under 2 m at the loft’s eave. The tradition’s ideal ceiling is neither low nor cavernous, and the studies on ceiling height agree with it from the other side.

Fig. 02 Three ceilings and one person, drawn in section. A: a low ceiling at 2.2 m, the height of an attic bedroom or a study, which the tradition reads as yin and enclosing and which suits the close, concrete work the priming study found under it. B: the usual 2.6 m, the ceiling the body does not think about. C: a high ceiling at 3.4 m, the height of an old hall or a gathering room, which the tradition reads as yang and under which the same study found people thinking in more abstract terms. Neither extreme is a fault. The tradition asks that the height suit the use, high where people gather and low where they sleep and concentrate, and that a house have both; the studies on ceiling height, which primed freedom under high ceilings and confinement under low ones, agree from the other side.

1The bed, its head on the gable wall and the whole bed in the band over two metres
2The ghosted bed along the eave, the sleeper’s head under one and a half metres: a beam by another name
3The desk under the dormer, where the roof is cut and the height is full to the window
4The wardrobe and the low cupboards in the band under one and a half metres, the eave storage
5The stair, arriving at the gable end with two metres of headroom over every tread
6The ridge line, the room’s one full-height axis; the tradition’s hill, and the place to stand

Plan 03 A room under the roof, in plan A bedroom of six metres by four under a double-pitched roof, drawn with the head-height contours that a section would show and a plan usually hides. The ridge runs along the room’s long axis and the ceiling falls to both eave walls, to a metre where it meets them. The dashed lines are the heights: two metres, inside which a person stands, and one and a half, inside which a person sits. Everything the room asks is a matter of which band a thing is in. The bed stands with its head on the gable wall, under the ridge, entirely inside the two-metre band, so that the sleeper can sit up and nothing slopes over their face; the ghosted bed along the eave, which is where the room seems to invite a bed because the wall is long, puts the sleeper’s head under the one-and-a-half-metre line, which the tradition reads as a beam by another name and the sleeper reads as a ceiling they hit. The desk is under the dormer, where the roof has been cut and the height is full to the window, which is the one place in the low band where a person can sit at a table. The wardrobe and the low cupboards take the rest of the low band, which is the eave storage every loft conversion ends up with. The stair arrives at the gable end, where the roof is highest, because the regulations ask two metres over every tread, and a loft stair that arrives under the slope fails it. The ridge is the room’s one full-height axis: the tradition’s hill, and the line a person walks.

1The light well in front, its window also the way out: a third of a square metre clear, the sill under 1.1 m
2The bed with its head on the inner wall, the hall behind it and the window before it, away from the earth
3The ghosted bed against the retaining wall, the sleeper’s head to the cold and the damp
4The desk under the window, the one place with daylight, the well’s wall painted pale to send it in
5The extract fan on the retaining wall and the dehumidifier beside it: the damp measured, not smelt
6The radon sump under the corner and the membrane under the floor, where the gas comes from the ground

Plan 04 A basement bedroom, in plan A basement room of five metres by four with the earth on two sides behind retaining walls, a light well cut into the front, and the hall and the stair up on the fourth side, drawn as the tradition and the regulations would both furnish it. The light well is the room’s one source of daylight and, since a basement bedroom must have a way out that is not the stair, its window is the escape window: the regulations ask a clear opening of a third of a square metre, no dimension under 450 millimetres and the sill no higher than 1.1 metres, and the well itself must be climbable. The bed stands with its head on the inner wall, the wall to the hall, which is warm, dry and behind it, with the window before it; the ghosted bed against the retaining wall is the one the room invites, since the long wall is there, and it puts the sleeper’s head against a metre of cold earth, which the tradition reads as sleeping in the ground and a thermometer reads as the coldest, dampest surface in the house. The desk is under the window, the only place a page gets daylight, and the well’s wall is painted pale to send more of it in. The extract fan is on the retaining wall and the dehumidifier beside it, with a meter, since the damp the guidelines warn of is measured and not smelt. The radon sump is under the corner with the membrane under the floor, because the gas comes from the ground and a basement is where it collects. Every item is the tradition’s reluctance to sleep below ground turned into a room that can be slept in.

Feng shui in a day 4 drawings

Plan 01 The order of work: eight stations on one flat, numbered in the order the tradition reads a house One, the front door, outside and in. Two, the line from the door through the flat, drawn ghosted, and the screen across it, drawn solid. Three, the bed. Four, the desk. Five, the seats. Six, the windows, for light and air. Seven, the stove. Eight, the floor, and the five places clutter lands. The numbers are the order in which each decision constrains the next; the line under the plan is the same order as a day.

Fig. 02 One flat, morning and evening. In the morning the front door opens onto a line that runs through the hall to the window at its end; the bed lies in that line under the bedroom window; the desk faces the wall with the sitter’s back to the door; the sofa floats in the middle of the living room with its back to the entrance; and the floor by the door, under the bed and along the hall carries what the household has set down. In the evening the same things are in the places the eight stations give them: a screen and a plant a step inside the door break the line; the bed has the solid wall behind its head and the door in view; the desk has the wall behind the chair and the window at its side; the sofa has its back to the wall and the door in sight; the windows have curtains and can open; the stove is unchanged, read rather than moved; and the floor is clear. Nothing in the evening plan was bought. The screen is the one object, and a bookcase does its work. The hours are the guide’s: the door and the line in the morning, the three resting places at midday, the windows, the stove and the floor in the afternoon.

Fig. 03 The page the day ends on, filled in with the worked reading’s entries as an example. At the top, the four facts a reading rests on and a practitioner would ask for first: the facing in degrees and as a mountain, taken from the side the flat opens to and read twice; the sitting, its opposite; the period, from the year the building was finished; and the kua of each sleeper, from the years of birth, which the Compass schools use and the Form reading does not. Then the plan, drawn at a scale, with the centre found and the eight sectors ruled from it, which is where the compass schools’ readings are laid if the household wants them. Then the three findings in order of weight, the bed before the door and the door before the stove, each a line; the remedies in order of cost, with the free ones first and the trade’s name for the rest; and, at the foot, what could not be fixed, which for this flat is nothing and for some flats is the reason to move. A household that keeps this page can read its own next flat, hand it to the next practitioner, and see in a year what changed. The sheet is the site’s, made from the order the practitioner manuals keep and the report the hiring guide says a client should receive. A reading without a page like this one was a conversation.

Fig. 04 The day, in minutes. The eight stations of the route laid on a bar from nine in the morning to six, each block the length the station takes for a flat of two bedrooms with two people working: the door and its line in the first hour and a half, the bed the long block before lunch, the desk and the seats after it, the windows and the stove in the afternoon, the floor last, and the page, the evening’s writing of what was done and what was left, at the end. Two breaks are drawn because the day needs them: the bed alone is ninety minutes of moving a heavy thing and remaking it, and a household that runs the route without stopping does the floor badly. Nothing on the bar needs a purchase, a drill or a second day, and the two things the guide says not to do in a day, the compass and the shopping, are not on it. Times are the site’s from the guides’ own procedures, for a two-bedroom flat and two pairs of hands; a studio takes a morning, a house with stairs takes the day and the floor waits for the next.

Building and renovating 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The order of decisions when building or renovating, as the tradition reads a house and as the builder has to make them: from the site, which cannot be changed, down to the finishes, which can be changed in an afternoon. The bar beside each rung is how hard the decision is to undo once made, and it shortens as the ladder descends. The site and the facing are the two the classics are about and the two nobody can revisit; the shape of the plan, the door and the position of the stairs and the wet rooms are structural and cost a wall or a drain to move; the bedrooms and the kitchen are partitions and services; the finishes are paint. A renovation joins the ladder wherever the walls allow and works downward; a new build starts at the top, and a client who brings a consultant in at the finishes has asked for help with the one rung that did not need it. The rungs are the site’s reading of the classics’ order, the five steps of the landform school at the top and the yang-house manuals’ door, stair and stove in the middle, with the modern finishes at the foot. The bars are a judgement of cost, not a measurement.

Fig. 02 One flat, its structure decided twice. On the left the beams are run on the lines of the walls, so no room has one across it; the columns are kept in the corners, where a wall already turns; and the drains are taken to the outside wall, which puts the bathroom on the perimeter and the kitchen sink beside it. On the right the same flat with the three decisions taken later: a beam crosses the bedroom where the bed's head will go and another crosses the kitchen over the worktop, a column stands free in the living room at somebody's shoulder, and the drains run to a stack in the middle, which lands the bathroom in the centre of the plan. The rooms and the furniture are identical in both. The beams are drawn dashed because they are overhead, not on the floor; the drain run is the dotted line. The tradition's objections — a beam over the bed, a blade at the shoulder, the wet room in the centre — are the three this drawing is about, and each is met here by a line on a structural drawing rather than by a remedy later. What a renovation can still reach is the subject of the next drawing.

Fig. 03 What each kind of job can reach. The site’s items as rows, ordered from the easiest to the hardest to change, and the kinds of work as columns, from a weekend with paint to a new build; a filled mark where the job can change the item, a half mark where it can partly or with the building’s consent, a dot where it cannot. The two rows at the top, the bed and the mirrors, are a morning’s work at any stage and are the first guides. The stove needs the fit-out, because its position is a gas point or a circuit; the line from the door needs walls to move, though a screen serves at any stage. The bedroom’s walls, the bathroom and the front door step up the ladder, each needing the kind of work that touches the fabric, and in a block the last two need the building’s consent as well. The stair and the facing are at the bottom: the stair is structure and the one item most renovations leave, and the facing is the building’s orientation and is set once, at the new build, and never again. Consent means the freeholder, the block or the planning office as the case is. The ordering is the site’s reading of what the building trades can do; the eight items are the ones the guides return to.

Quiet 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The house in decibels. A quiet bedroom at night sits near twenty-five; the World Health Organization’s guideline asks for no more than thirty inside the bedroom at night and forty outside it, averaged over the year, and fifty-five outdoors by day. A fridge through a wall is thirty-five, a wind chime by an open window forty-five, rain on a roof fifty; conversation is sixty, a fountain indoors and close sixty-five, traffic at an open window seventy, a vacuum cleaner seventy-five. The scale is logarithmic: every ten decibels is roughly twice as loud to the ear, so the traffic at the window is not twice the fridge but eight or ten times. The tradition’s still room is the room below the two night lines, and its dislike of water and chimes in the bedroom is the scale read at its middle. The household figures are typical values, from the acoustic handbooks, at the distances given; the thresholds are the WHO’s European night noise guideline of 2009 and its community noise guideline. A wall of brick drops a sound by about forty-five decibels, a closed double-glazed window by thirty, a curtain by a few.

Fig. 02 What each layer between a sleeper and the street takes off the noise, in decibels, as ranges on one scale. A plastered brick wall takes off forty-five to fifty, which is why the tradition’s solid wall behind the bed is also the quiet one; a closed double-glazed window about thirty, and the acoustic kind with laminated glass and a wide gap nearly forty; a single pane in the twenties; a stud partition about thirty, which is the wall most modern flats have between rooms. Earplugs worn well take off twenty to thirty. A rug takes ten to twenty off the footfall from the flat above and nothing off its voices. An open window takes off almost nothing, five to fifteen, whatever the glass, which is why the air guide’s morning window and this guide’s night window are two windows. A bookcase adds mass to a light partition and takes a few decibels; a heavy curtain takes two to five off the room’s own echo and none off the street. The scale is logarithmic in the ear: ten decibels off is a halving of loudness, and the difference between an open and a closed window is the difference between a street and a suburb. Figures are typical laboratory and field values for the constructions named, rounded to fives; a real window depends on its seals and frame, and a wall on its flanking paths. The WHO guidelines give the night-time targets the reductions are measured against.

Plan 03 A flat planned against its noise The street runs along the bottom of the plan, the lift and the stair are on the right, and a neighbour’s television is on the far side of the left wall. The bedroom is in the top left corner, the quietest, with the bed’s head to the top wall, which faces nothing; the wardrobe stands on the party wall between the bed and the neighbour, and the bathroom sits between the bedroom and the lift as a buffer of water and tile. The living room takes the street, with a bookcase on the party wall, a rug on the floor and heavy curtains at the window; the bedroom door closes to the floor and a strip on it stops what comes under. Nothing that hums, drips or ticks stands in the bedroom. The tradition’s still room and the acoustician’s are the same room, at the far end from every source.

Moving house 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The moving day as the tradition keeps it, in the order it keeps it. First the day, taken from the almanac under the heading “entering the house”, on an officer that settles, completes or opens and never on one that breaks, and clear of the household’s clash animals. Second the stove: the first thing carried over the threshold is the kitchen’s, the rice pot full and the fire lit before anything else is unpacked, so that the house has eaten before it has furniture. Third the bed, settled against its wall on its own almanac day, and slept in that first night by the whole household, because a house that is not slept in is not yet lived in. Fourth the door, dressed with its couplets and its door gods, which tell the street who has arrived. Fifth the meal, the warming of the house, eaten with the door open and the table full. The sequence is a rite of passage in van Gennep’s sense, a leaving, a threshold and an entering, and it is also, read as a checklist, the order in which a house becomes usable. The headings are the almanac’s: entering the house and settling the bed are two of its standard items, each with its own good and bad days, and the Cantonese call the whole rite entering the fire, yap fo, after the stove. The details vary by region; the order does not.

Plan 02 The first day, drawn before the van A flat of ten metres by seven, with the front door on the right. The plan is drawn before the move, with the two positions that matter decided on paper: the bed against the bedroom’s solid wall with the door in view, and the sofa against the living room’s wall facing the room, both as dashed outlines that the movers carry the furniture straight into. The rooms are numbered in the order they are made usable on the day: the bedroom first, so that the first night is a night; the kitchen second, with the stove lit and the kettle on before the boxes are opened; the bathroom third, towels and soap; the living room last, because nobody needs it until the evening. The route from the door to the bedroom is kept clear of boxes, which go against the walls of the rooms they belong to and nowhere else. The tradition’s order and the removal firm’s are the same order.

Fig. 03 Holmes and Rahe’s Social Readjustment Rating Scale of 1967, the items a move touches drawn against the heaviest items on the list. The scale asked people to weight forty-three life events by the adjustment each demanded, with marriage set at fifty; a change of residence alone scores twenty, below a holiday and above Christmas, and no one would call it grave. But a move is seldom alone. A household that has bought a house has taken a mortgage, changed its living conditions, changed its residence, changed the children’s schools and, for the first weeks, changed how everyone sleeps and eats, and the six shaded items add to a hundred and twenty-seven, more than the scale gives the death of a spouse. The tradition’s three days of fire, bed and door, and its meal with the door open, are the parts of a move it could shorten. Holmes and Rahe 1967; the values are the original scale’s, and the mortgage item is the scale’s ‘mortgage over $10,000’, a large one in 1967. The sum is the site’s arithmetic and not the authors’; the scale was validated on totals over a year, and a move stacks its items in a month.

Choosing a flat 3 drawings

Fig. 01 A tower of twenty floors in section, with the street in front of it, a row of trees and a lower neighbour, and the floors banded as the tradition and the research read them. The ground floor is shops, lobby and refuse, and the road’s line and noise. The low floors, one to three, are at the level of the street and the tree canopy: the noisiest, the most overlooked, and the ones the manuals read as taking the road’s sha. The middle band, from about the fourth floor to the twelfth, is above the trees and below the wind, with a view of the neighbours’ roofs rather than the sky; it is the band the tradition prefers, because qi is read as gathering where it is sheltered and scattering where the wind takes it. The high floors have the wind, the sun and the view, and the longest wait for the lift; the top floor has the tank, the motor room, the heat and the leaks. The bands are not rules. They are the trade-offs of height, which every buyer weighs and the tradition named first. The floor heights are drawn at three metres; the tree canopy at three storeys, which is a mature street tree. Gifford’s review of the research on high-rise living finds most people, and families with children in particular, less satisfied the higher they live, with the view the one thing that improves; the tradition’s middle band is where the two curves cross.

Plan 02 A floor of a slab block, read from the corridor A typical floor of a slab block with seven flats, the lifts at the left end of a corridor and the stair and the refuse room at the right. The tradition reads the corridor as a river and the lift doors as its mouth: the line runs from the lifts down the corridor to the door of the flat at its end, D, which takes both the corridor’s line and the lifts’ opening, and is the flat the practitioners ask about first. B and F have their doors opposite each other, the door-to-door fault of the manuals, which in a corridor means two households’ comings and goings in each other’s hall. G has its door beside the refuse room and the stair, the one thing on a floor that is always heard and sometimes smelt. A, E and D are corner flats with windows on two sides, which the tradition wants for the air and the light; B, C, F and G have one aspect. The reading is the same one the Hong Kong practitioners give a floor plate, and it is also the estate agent’s pricing, in a different order.

Fig. 03 The four faults that belong to flats in particular, each drawn in the flat it happens in. The through-hall, chuan tang, is the front door in one line with the balcony glass, so that the hall and the balcony are a single sightline through the flat: the tradition reads qi entering and leaving in one breath, a designer a flat with no place to arrive in, and a screen, a bookcase or a turn answers both. The door onto the kitchen puts the stove in the first sight from the threshold, and the kitchen page’s rule about fire at the door applies; a half wall or the stove moved off the door’s line is the fix. The bathroom at the centre of the plan with no window is the fault the site treats as the flat’s one real problem, since nothing moves it, and the answer is a fan that runs and a door kept shut. The fourth is below the floor and off the plan: a bedroom over a shop’s kitchen, a garage or the refuse store, read by the practitioners as sleeping on fire or fumes and by the acoustician as sleeping over an extract fan that runs until two in the morning. Bruun 2008 for the practitioners’ readings; Evans 2003 and the WHO night-noise guidelines for what lies below; the site’s guides for the fixes. North is up in the plans; the fourth panel is a section.

Hiring a practitioner 3 drawings

Fig. 01 A classical consultation in the order it is done. First the brief, at a table, before anything is looked at: who lives in the house and who will, their years of birth for the kua, when the house was built or last moved into for the period, what is wrong and what is wanted, and how the household sleeps and works. Second the street: a practitioner walks the approach before the door, reading what stands behind, what flanks and what faces, the block as a site. Third the door, where the compass is set on the threshold, away from the steel, and the facing taken in degrees, twice; this is the one measurement of the visit and everything in a compass reading follows from it. Fourth the rooms, walked with the plan in hand, the bed, the desk and the stove located and their lines drawn from the door and the window. Fifth the written report, the findings in order of weight and the remedies in order of cost, the cheapest first, with what cannot be fixed said plainly. A consultation that runs in another order, or that skips the street or the compass, is a different service. The order is the Form-then-Compass order of the classical manuals and of the practitioners Bruun and Feuchtwang watched at work; the brief at the table is where the Compass schools take their birth years and the Form school takes none. Two hours is a normal visit for a flat, half a day for a house with ground.

Fig. 02 A consultation report drawn as the page it should be, with the ten things the site would look for in it. The header gives the house, the date and the period; the facing in degrees and the mountain it falls in, with the sitting; and the school the reading belongs to, named, since a Form reading, an Eight Mansions reading and a Flying Stars reading of the same house are three documents. The plan is marked with the eight sectors from the centre, and the chart, if the school has one, stands beside it: the one part of the page a client cannot check. The occupants are listed with their kua if the school uses them. The findings come in order of weight, the bed, the desk and the door before any corner, and the remedies in order of cost, the ones that cost nothing first. The almanac’s dates follow if anything is to be changed, and the page ends with what cannot be fixed, said plainly. A report with these ten parts is following the form of the masters’ own texts, a description, a judgement and a prescription; a report that is a list of objects to buy is following the shop. Paton 2013 for the form the classical texts take; Bruun 2003 and 2008 for what a practitioner’s visit produces; the numbers on the drawn page are the worked house of the site’s case study, a Period 9 house sitting NW2 and facing SE2.

Fig. 03 What a good consultation looks like and what should worry a client, six signs each. A practitioner reading a house looks before speaking, sets a compass on the threshold and reads it twice away from the steel, asks how the household sleeps and works before it asks about money, says which school the reading belongs to, gives the cheapest remedy first, and says plainly what cannot be fixed, including when the answer is to move. One selling to a house sells the cure, in objects or a shop of their own; leads with fear, a curse, a death, a “must”; promises results by a date; works without a compass or with a phone held against a steel door; cannot say which school; and wants a yearly return without a chart that would change. The left column is the tradition’s own practice as the ethnographers describe it. The right is the trade. The signs are the site’s reading of Bruun’s fieldwork and Feuchtwang’s analysis, and of the manuals’ own warnings; the classics say a practitioner should leave a bad site, and the ones who never do are not following them. Fees vary by city; a written report and a plan should come with any of them.

The house for old age 3 drawings

Plan 01 The generations in a courtyard house A Beijing courtyard house of the classic plan, twenty-four metres by thirty-one, north at the top. The principal hall runs along the north side and faces south, into the sun and the courtyard: its central bay is the hall with the ancestral altar on the back wall, and the two rooms either side of it are the elders’, the warmest, the brightest and the quietest in the compound, furthest from the gate. The east wing is the eldest son’s family and the west wing the second son’s, each a step down in light and standing. The inner gate divides the family’s court from the outer one, where the gatehouse rooms along the south wall hold the kitchen, the servants and the study, and the main gate stands at the south-east corner behind its screen wall. The plan is a diagram of a family: the older the person, the further from the street and the nearer the sun, and the site’s guide for later life keeps the same order in a flat.

Fig. 02 A room for later life in section, with the numbers that furnish it. The bed is set at fifty-two centimetres, a hand higher than the usual forty-five, so that the knees do the least work in rising; the chair beside it has arms and a seat at forty-seven, for the same reason. A night light sits at thirty centimetres on the wall between the bed and the door, on a sensor, so that the way to the bathroom is lit without a switch being found; the switch itself is at a hundred, where a hand rests, and a grab bar stands at ninety by the door, which a hand reaches for before a fall and not after. The threshold is no threshold, a change of surface flush with the floor, since a lip of two centimetres is the commonest trip in a house. The stair has risers of seventeen and treads of twenty-eight, a rail on both sides at ninety above the nosings, and a nosing in a contrasting colour, which is what an older eye needs to see the edge. The light in the room is doubled: three hundred lux in general and five hundred where the hands work, because an eye at seventy needs two to three times the light of an eye at twenty to see the same. The numbers are the accessibility standards’ and the falls literature’s, not the tradition’s, which kept its elders warm and near the sun and left the rest to the household; the section is what a designer adds to the tradition’s room. Templer’s studies of stairs and the Cochrane review of home modifications are the sources for the stair and the bar.

1The bed at knee height, 52 cm, a lamp and its switch at the pillow
2The route: three metres, straight, nothing on the floor
3A night light at ankle height along the route, on a sensor
4The door left open at night; no threshold, or a flush one
5A grab bar at the toilet and the light switch inside the door
6The rug gone, or fixed down at every edge; no cable across the route

Plan 03 The night route, bed to bathroom The room for later life with the one journey the falls research cares about most drawn on it: from the bed to the bathroom at night, the journey that gathers most of the risk factors the falls research names. The bed stands at knee height with a lamp and its switch at the pillow, so that the first thing a hand finds is light. The route is three metres, straight, with nothing on the floor; a night light at ankle height along it, on a sensor, lights the floor and not the eyes; the bedroom door is left open at night and its threshold is flush, since the raised sill of an old house is the step the foot does not expect. In the bathroom a grab bar stands at the toilet and the light switch is inside the door at the hand’s height. The rug is gone, or fixed down at every edge, and no cable crosses the route. Everything on the plan is in the Cochrane review’s list of what a home-safety assessment changes, and everything is also the tradition’s room for the elders, which put the bed near the light and the way to the door short and clear.

Planting by direction 3 drawings

Plan 01 Trees round a house, by direction A plot of ten metres by eight with the house at its centre and the door and the gate on the south. Along the north the manuals want the evergreens, a windbreak taller than the roof, the tortoise made of trees; along the east, the dragon side, bamboo and deciduous trees that may stand tall; on the west, the tiger side, a single deciduous tree for the afternoon sun, kept below the eaves so that the tiger does not raise its head; along the south, low flowering shrubs that leave the bright hall open and the door in the light. Nothing stands on the line from the door to the gate: a tree in the gate makes the character for idleness, and a tree before the door blocks the mouth of qi. The plan is the Form school’s site drawn in trees, and it is also the arborist’s: shade where the sun is hot, shelter where the wind is cold, and the view kept open where the house looks out.

Fig. 02 The manuals’ sayings about trees, eight of them, with the reason each gives and where the tree is welcome. Half are puns and half are observations, and the tradition did not always tell them apart: the mulberry is kept from the front of the house because its name sounds like mourning, the willow from the back because it is the graveyard’s tree and droops, the poplar from the courtyard because its leaves rattle all night, which the sayings call ghosts clapping; the cypress belongs to the tomb. The peach is welcome because its wood was thought to turn ghosts, and the peach-wood boards hung on doors at New Year are the ancestors of the couplets; the pomegranate for its seeds, the pine for its winter green and its long life, and the bamboo for Su Shi’s reason, that a house without it is not fit to live in. The list is the one the Ming manuals and the almanacs repeat, and Knapp records it from the houses themselves. The sayings are given in the form the folk manuals use; the sources are the Yuan Ye for the garden’s art, Knapp for the beliefs, and Clunas for the Ming garden. Where the reason is a pun the site says so, and where it is a tree that drops, drips or rattles, the arborist agrees with the saying.

Fig. 03 What a tree on the west wall does, in section. The same house and the same deciduous tree on its west side, drawn twice. On a summer afternoon the sun stands high, about fifty-five degrees at three o’clock in a temperate latitude, and the tree in leaf stops it before the wall and the window, so that the west room, the one the tradition called the tiger’s and kept low, is in shade through the hours that heat a house most; Akbari’s Sacramento houses with a tree in this place cut their cooling energy by about a third. On a winter afternoon the sun stands low, about twenty degrees, and the bare tree lets it under the branches to the wall and the window, which is the whole point of a deciduous tree in this place and the reason the sayings never put a pine there. The evergreen row on the north side is the same in both seasons and does the other half of the work, breaking the winter wind on the side the sun does not reach. A deciduous tree to the west and evergreens to the north is what Heisler’s review draws for a temperate house, and it is the tradition’s tiger and tortoise with the animals’ names left off. The sun angles are for about forty degrees north, mid-afternoon at the solstices; nearer the equator the summer sun is higher and the west tree matters more. The savings are Akbari and colleagues’ measured range, for houses in a hot dry summer.

The baby’s room 3 drawings

Plan 01 A room for a baby A room of three metres sixty by three, with the door in the bottom wall at the right and the window in the top wall. The cot stands against the solid left wall with its head to it, out of the door’s line and a metre from the window and the radiator beneath it, which the paediatricians ask for the cold draught and the tradition for the same reason; nothing hangs over it, no shelf, no beam, no mobile within reach. For the first months the parents’ bed shares the room, drawn dashed, so that the cot is in view of the pillow, which is the safe-sleep guidance and the tradition’s confinement month in one plan. The changing table stands by the door with the light switch at hand, and the nursing chair takes the corner with a wall behind it and both the door and the cot in view, which is the command position for the one person in the house who is awake at three in the morning.

1Head to the solid wall, no shelf, picture or beam above · 2 A metre from the window and the radiator under it
3Out of the door’s line · 4 The blind cord tied up out of reach, the cot not beside it
5The parents’ bed, the cot seen from the pillow · 6 Nothing in the cot: no bumper, pillow, quilt or toy

Plan 02 The cot, with its distances The parents’ room for the first six months, four metres by three and a half, with the cot placed by the two lists at once. The cot stands against the solid wall with its head to it, which is the bed placement guide’s rule at a small scale, and nothing hangs above it, no shelf, no picture, no beam; a mobile, if there is one, is out of reach. It stands a metre from the window and the radiator beneath it, for the draught and the heat; that metre is the site’s convention and not a safety standard, since no guidance gives a distance, and it is drawn at about where a radiator stops being felt on the hand. It stands out of the door’s line, so that the door opens onto the room and not onto the sleeper. The blind cord is tied up out of reach and the cot is not beside it, which the safety guidance treats as the room’s one strangulation hazard. The parents’ bed stands where the cot is seen from the pillow, the first condition of room-sharing without bed-sharing. Inside the cot there is nothing but the child on a firm flat mattress: no bumper, no pillow, no quilt, no toy, which is the safe-sleep list’s and the tradition’s, since the tradition hung its charms on the wall and never in the bed.

Fig. 03 The first year as the tradition keeps it, on a line drawn so that the first month and the whole year both fit. At the birth the bed mother is thanked at the bed. On the third day the child is bathed for the first time before the family, the xi san, with coins and eggs in the water. The first thirty days are the confinement, the month the mother does not leave the house, the room is kept warm and closed and visitors are kept out, which is the tradition’s postnatal ward; it ends at the full month, when the child’s head is shaved, red eggs are sent to the relations and the child is shown to the world with a name. At a hundred days the first feast is given, and at the first birthday the child is set before a tray of objects, a brush, a coin, a seal, a needle, and what it reaches for is read as its life, the choosing test the novels made famous. The rites are the household’s calendar for a new person, and the site’s guide reads the room they were kept in. The rites are the ones Bodde finds in the Han and Knapp in the modern house, and the confinement is the practice Pillsbury described from Taiwan and Hong Kong as doing the month; the days are the traditional ones and vary by region within a week.

On the road 3 drawings

Plan 01 A hotel room, read for one night The room every chain builds, six metres deep by three sixty wide with the entry corridor beside the bathroom: the bed against the wall opposite the bathroom with its head to it, which the plan gives before the guest arrives; the door at the end of the corridor, in view from the pillow, which the plan also gives; the window at the far end with the desk under it and the chair beside. What the guest changes in ten minutes is drawn with arrows: the mirror on the wardrobe door, which faces the bed, is swung open against the wall; the chair is turned so that its back is to the wall and the door in view, for the one hour of work; the desk lamp is moved to the far side of the bed as the night light, the room’s own lamps being over the pillow; the blackout curtain is drawn to the wall and the gap pinned; the air conditioning is set to nineteen degrees; and the phone goes on the desk, not the bedside table. The bed is not moved, and the room does not need it to be.

Fig. 02 Light after a long flight, as the research on jet lag prescribes it, drawn as two days. Flying east, the body’s clock must be moved earlier, and the cue that moves it is light in the local morning and darkness in the local evening: seek the sun between six and eleven, keep the curtains drawn and the screens off from five in the afternoon. Flying west the clock must move later, and the prescription reverses: avoid the early morning light, seek it from the late afternoon into the evening. The hours are the local ones and shift by an hour or two with the length of the flight; for more than eight time zones the first day is treated as the reverse of the rule, since the clock may go the wrong way round. The tradition’s traveller had none of this and did not need it, since he moved at the speed of a horse; what he had was the almanac’s day for setting out and the inn’s bed against a wall, which the site’s guide keeps. The prescription is Waterhouse and colleagues’ review in the Lancet, which gives the light-seeking and light-avoiding windows by direction and by the number of zones crossed; the site rounds them to whole hours. The clock itself is the one the sleep guide describes, and it is set by the same light at home.

1The bed first: moved to the solid wall, the door in view, away from the window
2If it cannot move: the head turned to the wall and a chair set in the door’s line
3The desk second: the wall behind, the light from the side, the door in view
4The window third: the curtain closed at night and opened at first light, every day
5The shelf facing the door, with the one photograph and the one object from home
6The plant, alive, by the window: the household in a pot

Plan 03 A room for a month, made a house The tradition’s rule for the long stay was to make the room a house, in the order a house is made, and the drawing gives a rented room of four metres by three and a half after it has been done. The bed came first, moved from under the window to the solid wall with the door in view, which is the command position and the first night’s rule kept for the month; where a bed cannot be moved, the head is turned to the wall and a chair is set where the door’s line would reach it, which is the ghosted alternative. The desk came second, set as the examination candidate set his in his lodging, the wall behind and the light from the side. The window came third, not as a thing to move but as a habit, the curtain closed at night and opened at first light every day, which is the one habit that makes a strange room stop being strange in a week. Then the small household: the shelf facing the door with the one photograph and the one object from home, which the Qing traveller made with a paper image of the household gods and the psychologists call territory, and a plant that is alive and has to be watered. A room lived in for a month by these rules is a house; one lived in from the suitcase is a corridor with a bed in it.

Doors inside the house 3 drawings

Fig. 01 Four faults of interior doors and their answers, each a plan of a small room or a piece of corridor with the fault above and the answer below, drawn ghosted. A: the swing. A door hung so that it opens onto the wall shows the visitor a wall and hides the room until they are inside it; hung on the other jamb it opens to show the room, which is the tradition’s first sight and Alexander’s corner door. B: two doors facing each other across a corridor, the door-to-door fault, give each room the other’s comings and goings; offset by the width of a leaf they do not. C: three doors in a line, the front door, an inner door and a back door or window, give the house a single line through it, the through-hall fault; a screen, a turn or one door moved breaks it. D: the bedroom door opposite the bathroom’s, which the manuals dislike for the smell and the sound and a designer for the same reasons; one of the two turned to open the other way, or kept closed, answers it. None of the four needs a wall moved; all of them can be answered with a hinge. The rooms are three metres by two and a half and the corridor a metre wide; the leaves are eighty centimetres. The faults are the yang-house manuals’ and the answers are the joiner’s, which is why the drawing shows hinges and not cures.

Fig. 02 The hall’s front as the tradition built it, in elevation: a row of six lattice doors between the columns, each a lattice of wood above and a solid panel below, hung on pivots at top and bottom so that any of them can be lifted out. The whole front of the principal hall was doors, and the household opened as many as the season asked: two in spring, all six in summer, when the hall became a roofed part of the court, and none in winter, when paper on the lattice let the light through and kept the wind out. Two are lifted out here and the court is seen through the gap. It is the door the yang-house manuals assume when they say a hall should open to its court and face south, and the reason their rule about a hall is not a rule about a doorway: the hall had no doorway, it had a wall that opened. The modern equivalents are the folding and sliding glass walls of a living room onto a terrace, and the room guides treat them as the tradition treated the lattice, as a front to be opened by the season and screened by the hour. Knapp gives the lattice doors of the halls of the north and the south with their patterns; Ruitenbeek’s carpenter’s manual gives their making. The lattice was papered in winter and open in summer; glass came late.

Fig. 03 How many doors a room can bear. A: a living room of five metres by three and three-quarters with four openings, one in each wall, the plan a converted house often ends up with; the paths between the doors are drawn, and they cross the room in every direction, so that there is no wall a sofa can stand against without a door behind it or a path across its front. The tradition’s word for the room is a corridor, and the manuals’ rule that a room with three or more doors leaks is this drawing. B: the same room with two doors, one closed off and made a wall, one turned to the corner, the paths gathered to one side of the room and three walls free; the sofa has its back to a wall and the door in view, which is the command position, and the room has a centre, which is the bright hall. The difference between the two is two hinges and a sheet of plasterboard. The counting rule is the yang-house manuals’, where a door is a mouth and a room with too many mouths cannot hold its breath; the designer’s version is Alexander’s, that the paths through a room should be kept to one side of it so that the rest is a place. Both drawings are to the same scale.

Fire in the house 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The hearth as the Western house’s wall of honour. A: the chimney wall in elevation. The fire is at the centre of the wall; the mantel above it stands at about a hundred and ten centimetres, near the height of the tradition’s altar table, and carries the clock, the photographs and the candlesticks that the altar table carried in burners and vases; above the mantel hangs the picture or the mirror, where the hall hung its scroll; and the two seats flank the fire as the two armchairs flanked the square table. The wall is symmetrical about the fire, which is what the tradition asked of the wall of honour, and the fire is the thing the room faces, which is what it asked of the altar. B: the same room in plan. The seats are drawn in the arc Alexander’s pattern for the fire asks for, facing the hearth and one another, with their backs to the walls and the door in view from the main seat; the television, drawn ghosted in the corner, is the one thing that competes with the fire for the room’s face and usually wins, which is why the tradition’s rule for the wall of honour and the designer’s for the hearth both ask that it be put to one side. The heights are the Western ones, the mantel at a hundred and ten and the seats at forty-five; the hall’s were ninety and fifty, and the drawing marks the difference. A room that has no fire keeps the same wall with a table and a picture, and the living room guide draws it.

Plan 02 A flat planned for fire A flat of ten metres by six and a half with the front door in the south wall, planned as the tradition’s stove rules and the fire research agree on it. The stove stands on the kitchen’s outer wall with nothing that burns above it and a clear half-metre either side, the Kitchen God’s place kept and the extractor above; a heat alarm hangs in the kitchen, where a smoke alarm would sound at every meal. Smoke alarms hang in the hall between the rooms and in each bedroom, on the ceiling and away from the corners. The bedroom doors are drawn closed, as the research asks them to be at night, because a closed door holds a fire and its smoke for the minutes an escape needs. The route from every bed to the front door is drawn and kept clear of furniture, and it is the same route the moving guide keeps clear on the first day. The candles stand on the dining table, where nothing hangs over them, and not on the shelf under the curtain. The plan is the tradition’s house, watched by the god above the stove, with the alarms the god did not have.

Fig. 03 The minutes a fire allows, drawn as a clock. The upper bar is a room furnished as rooms were in the middle of the last century, wood, cotton and wool, which Kerber’s full-scale burns and the older tests before them brought to flashover, the moment every surface in the room ignites, at about thirty minutes; the lower bar is the same room furnished now, foam, polyester and plastics, which flashes over in three to five. On the modern bar the household’s minutes are marked: an alarm at about one, because a smoke alarm in the hall sounds within a minute of a fire in a modern room; a household awake and up at about two; the route and the door at about three. The margin is the width of the green band under the bar, and it is the reason the fire safety plan puts the alarms where it does and keeps the routes clear. Below the bars, the two bedrooms of the same burns, one with the door open and one with it closed, at the moment the room beyond flashed over: the open room’s air at about a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and the closed room’s under a hundred, breathable, with the fire on the other side of a single leaf of timber. A bedroom door closed at night is the cheapest of the minutes, and the one the tradition’s rooms already kept. Kerber 2012, UL Firefighter Safety Research Institute: the legacy-room and modern-room burns and the closed-door comparison. Times vary with the room and the fire; the ratio, about ten to one, is the finding. Temperatures in Fahrenheit as the paper reports them; a thousand is about 540 Celsius, a hundred is about 38. On a phone the same clock is drawn with its minutes running down the page, so that nothing has to be made smaller to fit.

Drawing your plan 4 drawings

Fig. 01 Drawing your own plan, in the order the site’s guides assume it was drawn. First measure: every wall in centimetres with a tape, the doors and windows marked with their positions along the wall, the thickness of the walls guessed at fifteen. Second draw: at one to fifty on squared paper, so that a square of five millimetres is a quarter of a metre and a room of four metres is eight centimetres; the plan of an estate agent is not to scale and is not used. Third north: a compass reading taken at the front door, standing outside on the threshold facing out, away from steel and twice, and the bearing drawn on the plan as an arrow, which the facing direction guide gives in detail. Fourth the centre: the balance point of the outline, from the calculation or the pin. Fifth the sectors: eight lines from the centre at forty-five degrees, turned to the bearing, which the bagua essay lays over the plan. Sixth the fixed things: the doors, the windows, the stove, the radiators and the sockets, drawn in ink, since they are what the furniture is placed against. The movable things are placed last and in pencil. A plan takes an afternoon for a flat and a day for a house; a laser measure halves it. The scale is the site’s own, and every plan drawing on the site can be laid over a reader’s at one to fifty.

Fig. 02 What fits on a page. A sheet of A4 is two hundred and ten millimetres by two hundred and ninety-seven, and at one to fifty, the scale every plan on this site is drawn at, it holds ten and a half metres by fourteen, which is a flat: the worked reading’s flat of nine by seven, drawn on the left sheet at that scale, fills it with a margin for the compass reading and the notes. At one to a hundred the same sheet holds twenty-one metres by thirty, which is a house and its garden, and the flat shrinks to a quarter of the page, too small to place a bed on with a pencil; an A2 sheet at one to fifty holds what an A4 does at one to a hundred and keeps the scale; an A3 at one to fifty holds seven tenths of each side of that, half the ground, which is a house but not its garden. The rule for choosing is the pencil’s: at one to fifty a centimetre on the page is half a metre in the room, and a bed of one and a half metres by two is a rectangle of three by four centimetres, which can be cut from card and moved; at one to a hundred it is a stamp. Draw the flat at one to fifty on A4, the house at one to fifty on A3, and the plot at one to a hundred or two hundred on whatever it needs. Squared paper at five-millimetre squares makes one to fifty a matter of counting: one square is a quarter of a metre. A laser measure reads to a millimetre and the drawing does not need it; the tape’s centimetre is enough.

Fig. 03 Finding the centre of a plan that is not a rectangle, three ways, on an L-shaped flat of eight metres by six with a three-metre square missing from one corner. A: the centre of the box that would enclose the plan, which the paperbacks use; on an L it falls near the edge of the missing corner, a metre from where the flat’s own middle is, and every sector drawn from it is wrong by that metre. B: the balance point, the centre of gravity of the shape, which the classical practitioners found by cutting the plan from card and balancing it on a pin, and which a calculation finds in a line: it sits inside the larger arm, where the flat’s mass is. C: the plan read as two rectangles, the main body and the wing, each with its own centre and its own eight sectors, which is what the yang-house manuals do with an annexe and what a practitioner does with any wing more than a third of the whole. The site uses B for one plan and C when the wing is a room in its own right; it never uses A. The balance point is found by weighting each rectangle’s centre by its area, or with scissors, card and a pin, which the in-a-day guide describes; the manuals used the pin. On a rectangle all three methods give the same point, which is why the difference is only noticed on an L.

Fig. 04 The five errors, each drawn in the plan it spoils, with the symptom under it and the check under that. The first is the mirrored plan, a developer’s drawing reproduced the wrong way round: the two are drawn side by side, and only one of them has the kitchen where the kitchen is. The second is the wrong north, taken from a phone held against a steel door frame, which the frame pulls, or from the top of a street map, which is not north either; the angle between the two needles is the size of the error, and it is enough to move a reading by a whole sector. The third is the centre taken from a box drawn round the plan instead of from the plan itself, which in an L moves the centre into the missing corner, so that a flat acquires a sector in a neighbour’s bathroom; the open cross is the box’s centre and the filled dot the house’s own. The fourth is the plan drawn by eye, on which a bed fits and in the room does not, with the true size ghosted over it and a scale bar beneath. The fifth is the plan with its fixed things left out, the beam, the radiator and the door swing drawn here in the second colour, and the bed put where the beam is. Panero and Zelnik 1979 for the furniture dimensions a plan has to carry; Alexander 1977 for why the fixed things decide where anything can go. The site’s own rule is shorter: a plan that has been walked with a tape is right, and one that has been downloaded is a guess.

The air in the house 3 drawings

Plan 01 Where the air stops A flat of ten metres by six and a half with windows on its north and south walls and none on the east or west. Air moves through it when a window on one side and a window on the other are open with the doors between them, and the arrows draw that path, from the living room’s south window through the hall to the bedroom’s north window; it is the tradition’s qi moving through the house and the engineer’s cross-ventilation, and it changes the air of the flat in minutes. The rooms shaded are the ones where it stops: the second bedroom, with a window on one wall only, where air comes in and goes out by the same opening and the room’s far corner is never reached; and the internal bathroom, with no window at all, which the tradition read as the house’s one dead room and the guide gives an extractor. The small marks on the doors are undercuts and the marks on the window frames are trickle vents, which let the air move at night with everything shut.

Fig. 02 The air in a room in two numbers. Above, carbon dioxide in parts per million, which is the measure of how much of the room’s air has been breathed already: outdoor air at about four hundred and twenty, a ventilated room at eight hundred, a meeting room by noon at fifteen hundred, a closed bedroom by morning at two and a half thousand and more with two sleepers. Allen and colleagues found decision-making measurably slower at a thousand and worse at fourteen hundred, which is where the mark is set. Below, fine particles in micrograms per cubic metre, on a scale that doubles every step: a clean room at five, the World Health Organization’s daily guideline at fifteen, a city street at forty, frying with the hood off at a hundred, an incense stick in a small room at two hundred and fifty and a candle-lit dinner beyond it. The tradition’s stale qi is the first scale and its smoke is the second, and both are the reading of a window that has not been opened. The carbon dioxide figures are typical, from the indoor-air literature and Seppänen’s review; the particle figures are typical peaks from the same literature and from the incense studies, and fall within an hour of the window opening. A monitor for both costs less than a practitioner’s visit.

Fig. 03 A bedroom’s night in carbon dioxide, for two sleepers from eleven until seven, drawn from the typical figures of the bedroom-air studies. With the window and the door shut, the room starts near outdoor air at five hundred parts per million and climbs all night, past the thousand where the research puts the first effects by one o’clock, to two and a half thousand by morning, which is the reading Strøm-Tejsen’s sleepers woke to and slept worse for. With trickle vents in the frame or the door left ajar the curve flattens at twelve or thirteen hundred, over the line but not far. With the window open a hand’s width it stays near eight hundred, the ventilated room of the guide’s scale. At seven the morning window is opened, and the shut room falls from its peak to outdoor air in a quarter of an hour, which is the tradition’s first rule of the day drawn as a line. A monitor on the bedside table draws this curve for any household in a week, and the household then knows which of the three lines it sleeps under. The figures are typical of the studies of two-person bedrooms; a small room, a large sleeper or a child in the bed moves the shut curve up. Strøm-Tejsen and colleagues measured about two thousand four hundred parts per million closed against eight hundred open, and better sleep and next-day scores with the window open.

Selling a house 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The same flat before and after the afternoon a seller spends on it, and none of it costs more than a screen. A: the six faults a buyer’s practitioner sees in the first ten minutes, which are the six the site’s room guides teach. The front door’s line runs straight through the living room to the balcony door, the through-hall fault; a mirror on the hall wall faces the front door and sends the arriving buyer back out; boxes stand in the entrance; the sofa has its back to the door; the stove stands against the sink; and the bed lies with its head under the bedroom window, with the door out of its sight. B: a screen and a plant turn the door’s line; the mirror goes to the side wall, where it doubles the window; the entrance is bare to the mat; the sofa is turned to the wall with the door in its view; a chopping board sits between the stove and the sink; and the bed goes to the solid wall with the door seen from the pillow. A buyer who knows nothing of feng shui reads B as a bigger, calmer flat, which is what the staging research finds people feel; a buyer’s practitioner reads it as a flat with nothing to report. The six fixes are the command position, the mirror rule, the door’s line, the fire-and-water rule and the clear entrance, each with its own guide on the site. The plan is drawn without the seller’s furniture beyond the pieces that matter, which is also the advice: a buyer should see the room, not the household.

Fig. 02 What the research has measured of feng shui in a sale price, on one scale. A flat in Hong Kong where a death has occurred, a xiong zhai, sells for about a fifth less than its neighbours, and Bhattacharya, Huang and Nielsen found the discount spilling to the other flats on its floor and, smaller, to the block. A house number ending in four in the Chinese neighbourhoods of Vancouver sold for two per cent less and one ending in eight for two and a half per cent more, and Fortin, Hill and Huang found no such effect in the neighbourhoods where Chinese buyers were few, which Bourassa and Peng had found in Auckland fifteen years before. Staging, in the experiment Lane, Seiler and Seiler ran with photographs of the same room furnished and bare, changed how liveable buyers thought the room was and did not change what they said they would pay. The numbers are the size of the tradition in the market: large for a death, small for a number, and nothing where the buyers do not hold the belief. Chau, Ma and Ho found a premium for flats on Hong Kong floors with an eight in 2001, and Shum, Sun and Wu one in Chengdu in 2014; both were premiums of a few per cent that grew in a rising market. The figures are averages over thousands of sales, and a single sale can go either way.

Fig. 03 What the tradition is worth in a price, drawn against a zero line, with the studies that measured it. Only two of the nine rows have a published figure and they are the two the trade never mentions: a Hong Kong flat in which someone had died sold for about a fifth less than its neighbours, and a Vancouver address ending in four sold for about two per cent less in the neighbourhoods where Chinese buyers were many, one ending in eight for about two and a half per cent more. Three rows are directions without a figure here: the discount on a haunted flat spilling smaller to the rest of the floor and smaller again to the block, and the premium on a floor numbered with an eight, which Chau found in Hong Kong and Shum in Chengdu and both found larger in a rising market than in a falling one. Three rows are zero. The same digits in the suburbs where Chinese buyers were few moved nothing, in Vancouver and in Auckland before it; staging a room changed what buyers felt about a house and not what they said they would pay; and the object by the door has never been measured by anybody, because no study has gone looking for it. The tradition is in the price, and it is in the history of the room and the number on the gate, neither of which an object touches. Bhattacharya, Huang and Nielsen 2021; Fortin, Hill and Huang 2014; Bourassa and Peng 1999; Chau, Ma and Ho 2001; Shum, Sun and Wu 2014; Lane, Seiler and Seiler 2015. The bars are the published central estimates and the open marks are effects the studies establish in direction without a figure given here. Every one of them is a fact about buyers, not about houses.

Recovering at home 2 drawings

1Head to the solid wall · 2 The window and its trees in view
3The door seen, not in line · 4 The visitor’s chair, face in view
5Table on the strong side · 6 A low light for the night
7Curtain opened at first light

Plan 01 The sickroom A bedroom of six metres by four arranged for a long illness, which is the arrangement the yang-house manuals gave the sick and the research on recovery has since measured. The bed’s head is on the solid wall and its foot toward the room, so that the sleeper commands it; the window is on the sleeper’s left with trees beyond it, the view Ulrich’s patients recovered faster with; the door is seen from the pillow at a diagonal and not in the bed’s line, which the tradition forbade for the well and the sick alike; the visitor’s chair stands where the patient sees the face without turning the head; the table is on the side of the stronger hand, within reach; a low light sits by the bed for the night, below the eye; and the curtain is opened at first light, because morning light through a window is the thing the sleep research and the tradition’s morning rule agree on. The marks are numbered and the key is below the plan.

Fig. 02 What a window does to recovery, in the numbers of two studies. Ulrich in 1984 compared forty-six patients recovering from the same gall-bladder operation in the same Pennsylvania hospital, half in rooms whose window looked onto a stand of trees and half in rooms whose window looked onto a brick wall, matched for age, sex and floor: the tree-view patients went home three-quarters of a day sooner, took a third as many doses of strong painkiller in the days when pain is worst, and drew a quarter as many critical notes from the nurses. Beauchemin and Hays in 1996 compared patients admitted for severe depression to the sunny and the dull rooms of the same ward and found the sunny rooms discharging them two and a half days sooner. Each pair of bars is scaled to its own larger value, so the bars compare within a row and not between rows. The tradition’s sickroom had its window to the garden and its curtain opened in the morning; the studies say why. Ulrich’s study is the most cited single paper in the field and small; it has been repeated in other forms since, with the same direction. Walch and colleagues in 2005 found patients on the bright side of a spinal-surgery ward taking about a fifth less pain medication than those on the dim side. The numbers are averages over groups; a single patient can go either way.

A flat, read from start to finish 2 drawings

A The door’s line runs to the balcony · B The bed’s head under the east window
C The stove in view of the front door · in each sector, its mountain and water stars

Plan 01 The flat, read The flat of the worked reading: a corner flat of nine metres by seven on the seventh floor, entered from a corridor on the west and facing east over a balcony, with windows east and south. The eight sectors are drawn from the balance point of the plan, and each carries the two stars of its palace from the Period 9 chart, the mountain star first and the water star second, so that the plan and the chart can be read together: the double 9 at the eastern facing, the 5 in the west at the door and the 5 in the north-east at the kitchen, the 8 and 1 in the two bedrooms. The three faults the Form reading found are marked. A: the front door’s line runs through the hall and the living room to the balcony door, the through-house. B: the bed in the east bedroom lies with its head under the window and its feet to the door. C: the stove is in view of the front door through the kitchen’s open side. The remedies for all three cost a screen, a bed turned and a half-height counter.

Fig. 02 The chart of the flat: Period 9, because the block was finished in 2025, sitting W2 and facing E2, because the compass read the balcony front at eighty-eight degrees. It is built by the rules the Flying Stars essay gives: 9 at the centre flown forward gives the period stars; the period star in the sitting palace, 2, becomes the mountain star and flies forward because the second mountain of the Kun palace is yang; the period star in the facing palace, 7, becomes the water star and flies backward because the second mountain of the Dui palace, You, is yin. In each palace the mountain star stands at the top left, the water star at the top right and the period star below. The result is the chart the school calls double stars at the facing, both 9s at the balcony: wealth strong and people in need of a hill behind them, which is what the readings on the right make of it, palace by palace, in the order of weight the report uses. The chart is the school’s and the site records it as such; the readings are the standard ones from the practitioner manuals. What in them can be tested is the advice about the bath, the stove and the bed, and that advice is the same the room guides give without a chart.

The student’s desk 3 drawings

Fig. 01 A child’s room of four metres by three at exam time, before and after an afternoon’s moving. A: the desk as most rooms have it, pushed against the window wall so that the child faces the glass with the door behind them and the light in their eyes by day and on the screen by night; the lamp stands on the right, where a right-handed writer’s own hand shadows the page; the bed lies with its head under the window and the shelves are across the room. B: the desk as the manuals place a scholar’s, with the solid wall behind the chair and the door seen at a diagonal without turning, which is the command position, and the window on the sitter’s left, so that daylight falls across the page from the far side of the writing hand; the lamp stands on the left for the same reason, the bed goes to the solid wall with its head away from the window, and the shelves stand behind the chair within an arm’s reach. Nothing is bought. The room is drawn for a right-handed child; a left-handed one has the window and the lamp on the right. The three conditions are the command position’s, given in the desk placement guide; the side the window goes is the drafting-room rule, light from the non-writing side. The Wenchang sector the Compass schools add is on the table below and does not move a desk out of B.

Fig. 02 The Wenchang position two ways, as the Compass schools give it and the site records it. Left, by the house: the schools take the number of the trigram the house sits on, fly it from the centre by the Lo Shu order the Flying Stars essay gives, and call the palace where the 4, the scholar’s star, lands the house’s Wenchang position; the table is computed by that rule, so a house sitting north has it in the north-east and a house sitting south-east has it at the centre, where a desk cannot go. Right, by the person: the Four Pillars’ table of the literary star, which gives each year stem a branch, so that a child born in a Jia year, 2004 or 2014, has it in the south-east, and one born in a Xin year, 2011 or 2021, in the north; the stem is found from the year, and the year begins at the spring festival. The two methods disagree for most children in most houses, and the schools resolve it by the house first and the person second, or the other way round, by lineage. The site places the desk by the command position and lets the Wenchang sector decide, if it can, which of two good walls. Both tables are the practitioner manuals’, Too’s and Skinner’s among them, and the year-stem table is the Four Pillars’ Wenchang guiren; the site describes the method and does not endorse the result. The desk goes where the wall, the door and the window put it, and the sector is a preference between good places.

Fig. 03 The desktop itself, twice, seen from above, with the sitter at the bottom edge of each and the light arriving from the left in both. On the left the scholar’s desk of about 1620, laid out as Wen Zhenheng’s treatise would have it: the paper square in the middle under the hand, weighted; the inkstone at the right, where the hand grinds, with the ink stick and the water dropper beside it and a small screen behind it to keep the dust off the wet ink; the brushes at the right rear in their pot and one on its rest; the arm rest along the right edge, which a hand lies on so the sleeve does not drag through the wet column; the seal and its paste at the left rear; and one object at the far left to look at and nothing else, because the manual is fierce about a crowded desk. On the right the same surface now. The laptop takes the middle where the paper was, the lamp stands at the left where the window is, the notebook lies where the inkstone was because the writing hand has not moved, the phone is face down, and the one plant stands where the scholar’s rock stood. Four hundred years and one clear rule survive: the light comes from the side of the hand that does not write, and everything else earns its place or leaves the desk. Wen Zhenheng, Zhang wu zhi, c. 1620–1627, read through Clunas 1991, for the classical layout and its fastidiousness about how few objects a desk should carry. The right-hand panel is the site’s, and assumes a right-handed writer; a left-handed one mirrors both.

Animals in the house 2 drawings

1The tank · living room, seen from the seats, moving water where movement belongs
2The dog’s bed · inside the door, off its line · 3 The bird · the east window, for the morning
4The cat’s shelf · a south sill · 5 The tortoise · a pot on the balcony
Refused: 6 a tank in the bedroom · 7 a dog on the bed

Plan 01 Where the animals go A flat of nine metres by seven, entered from the west, with its balcony to the east, and the animals placed as the tradition placed them. The fish tank stands in the living room against the wall the seats face, where its movement is seen and belongs, near the entrance and never in the bedroom, where the tradition refused water and the sleeper refuses the pump. The dog’s bed is inside the front door, where the courtyard kept its dog, but off the door’s line, so that the dog guards the threshold without lying across it. The bird’s cage hangs at the east window for the morning sun, which is where the old men of Beijing hung theirs before they carried them to the park. The cat’s shelf is on a south sill, in the sun, above the traffic of the floor. The tortoise lives in a pot of water on the balcony, the north of the flat’s outdoor room in the tradition’s reading, and comes in for the winter. Two places are refused: a tank in the bedroom, for the damp, the hum and the water the manuals would not have by a bed, and the dog on the bed, which the sleep study finds costing its owner a little every night.

Fig. 02 What the research has found an animal in the house worth, in the four studies the guide leans on. Friedmann and her colleagues followed ninety-two patients for a year after a heart attack and found three of the fifty-three who owned a pet dead at the year’s end against eleven of the thirty-nine who did not, a difference too large for the size of the study to explain away and too small a study to settle; Allen, Blascovich and Mendes gave two hundred and forty couples a stressful task at home and found blood pressure and heart rate rising least with the pet in the room, more with a friend and most with the spouse; Cracknell and colleagues measured a hundred and twelve visitors watching a large public tank as it was stocked and found heart rate and blood pressure falling while they watched and mood rising as the fish went in; and Patel and colleagues tracked forty dog owners’ sleep and found a dog in the bedroom costing nothing and a dog on the bed costing a little every night. Something alive in the house, a tank where the seats see it, the dog at the door and off the bed: the tradition’s placements, with the numbers the research adds. The numbers are the papers’, rounded; none of the four tested feng shui, and the first is the famous small study of its field. The guide gives what each does not show, which is that an animal is a cure.

The house in mourning 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The five grades of mourning, the wufu, which the Confucian rite fixed and Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals transmitted to every household that kept the rite from the Song onward. The grade is a cloth, a term and a degree of kinship, and the three move together: the closer the dead, the coarser the hemp and the longer it is worn. The first grade is unhemmed sackcloth with its edges left ragged, worn three years by a son for his father, which is the heaviest obligation the tradition knows and the one that took officials out of office to serve it. The second is the same sackcloth with its edges sewn, worn a year for grandparents, brothers and a son, and in shorter terms of five and three months for the generations above that. The third is a coarse but worked hemp for nine months, the grade of first cousins. The fourth is finer, five months, for second cousins and great-uncles. The fifth is the finest hemp for three months, and it reaches to third cousins, which is to say to everyone descended from one great-great-grandfather. That reach is the definition of a lineage: the mourning grades drew the family the tradition’s other rites then treat as a unit, and the household in white is that whole body, not the household in the house. Ebrey 1991 for Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals and the grades; Watson and Rawski 1988 for how the rite was kept in practice from the Song to Hong Kong; de Groot 1897 for the Fujian observances of the 1880s. Terms are the standard ones and were varied by lineage and by dynasty; the drawing simplifies a body of ritual law that fills chapters.

1The coffin on the axis, head to the interior · 2 The soul seat, portrait, incense, white candles
3The sons, east · 4 The women of the house, west · 5 The ancestral altar, the gods covered
6White lanterns at the gate · 7 The door gods and couplets papered white

Plan 02 The hall set for a wake The principal hall of a courtyard house set for a death, as the households of the late imperial period set it and the ethnographies of Hong Kong and Taiwan still find it. The coffin lies on the axis of the hall with its head to the interior and its feet toward the door, so that the dead lie as the elders sat, facing south down the axis to the gate. Before it stands the soul seat, a table with the portrait or the paper tablet, the incense burner, the white candles and the offerings, which is the altar of the household turned for a week toward one person. The sons kneel on the east side of the hall and the women of the house on the west, by the rank the funeral manuals give, and the visitors bow from the axis. On the back wall the ancestral altar keeps its place, and the gods on it are covered with red paper so that they do not see the death, which is the southern practice; the door gods and the couplets on the gate are papered white, the red lanterns replaced with white, and the gate stands open for the visitors. The hall is the house’s bright hall, and the tradition gave the dead the position it gave the living for a week.

Fig. 03 The household’s calendar after a death, on one line broken in two, the first hundred days at one scale and the years after at another. Above the line, what the household does: the hall set and the gate hung white on the day; the rites every seventh day for seven weeks, the seven sevens, a Buddhist count the households kept whatever else they believed; the soul seat taken down on the seventh seven; the tablet carried to the ancestral altar on the hundredth day; the grave visited and the rite held on the first anniversary; and the end of the formal mourning for a parent at twenty-seven months, the three years of the Confucian rite as the Family Rituals count them. Below the line, what the household does not do: no red at the gate for the year, no couplets and no red lanterns at the New Year, white or blue ones in their place; no wedding in the house and no feast; and no move, no building and no digging, the house left as it was until the mourning is out. The last of these is the one the site’s other guides keep meeting: a household in mourning does not move house, and the tradition and the stress research agree on the reason. The sequence is Ebrey’s Family Rituals and the essays in Watson and Rawski; the grades of mourning and their lengths varied by the relation and the region, and twenty-seven months is the parent’s. The seven sevens and the hundredth day are the household calendar of the south to this day.

The house for a wedding 2 drawings

1The bed, installed on its day, head to the solid wall and the couple’s direction
2The double happiness on the door · 3 The pair of red candles, dragon and phoenix
4The dressing table, its mirror turned from the bed · 5 The wardrobe on the far wall
6The window, papered red for the month

Plan 01 The bridal chamber The couple’s room as the tradition set it for a wedding, four metres by three and a half. The new bed is installed on a day the almanac gives for settling a bed, against the solid wall with its head turned, if the room allows, to a direction the couple’s two kua share, which the bed for two guide finds for any pair; the door is seen from the pillow and not in the bed’s line. The double happiness character is pasted on the door and the window, red paper cut in the pair of characters for joy; the pair of red candles, dragon and phoenix, stands on the table and burns through the wedding night. The dressing table stands with its mirror turned from the bed, which the mirror guide asks of every bedroom and the tradition asked first of this one. The wardrobe goes on the wall the bed does not face, and the window is papered red for the month. Nothing on the plan is a cure: it is the bedroom page’s room, made once for two people on a chosen day.

Fig. 02 The wedding as the house keeps it, in the order it keeps it. First the day, taken from the almanac under the heading for marrying, on an officer that settles or receives and never on one that breaks, and clear of the two families’ clash animals. Second the bed, the one piece of furniture a wedding buys: installed in the bridal chamber on its own almanac day by a woman of good fortune, one with a living husband, children and parents, who makes it up in red and rolls a small boy on it for the sons it is meant to bring. Third the gate, dressed with the double happiness character cut in red paper and the red lanterns, which tell the lane what the white cloth tells it for a death. Fourth the threshold, where the bride, brought by sedan or by car, steps over a brazier of coals or is carried over the sill, so that she enters the house clean of the road and does not touch its threshold. Fifth the tea, offered by the couple to the groom’s parents seated on the axis of the hall, which makes her the household’s and is the moment the tradition counted the marriage from. A rite of passage in three parts, a leaving, a threshold and an entering, and, read as a plan, the moving guide’s sequence with a person carried in instead of a stove. The headings are the almanac’s: marrying and settling the bed are two of its standard items, with their own good and bad days. The brazier is the southern custom and the carrying the northern; the tea is everywhere.

The neighbours 3 drawings

1Doors opposite: each hall opens onto the other’s comings and goings
2Doors offset: the manuals’ own answer, drawn in the plan
3A screen or a curtain inside one’s own door, a step in from the sill
4The door plain: no mirror, no charm, nothing aimed across
5A lamp and a mat outside, which make the corridor a hall the two households share

Plan 01 Door facing door, on a floor of a block A floor of a block, eighteen metres by seven, with a corridor down the middle and six flats. Two pairs of doors stand opposite each other, which the manuals call door facing door and read as a quarrel between the houses, and the plainer reading is two halls with no privacy from each other: whoever opens one door looks into the other’s flat. One pair is offset, which is the manuals’ own answer and the one a plan gives when it is drawn with the rule in mind; the site’s choosing a flat guide asks for it at the viewing. For a household already behind one of the facing doors there are three things to do, and none of them touches the neighbour’s door: a screen or a curtain inside its own door, a step in from the sill, so that the door can stand open without the flat in view; the door kept plain, with no mirror and no charm aimed across the corridor, since a thing aimed at a neighbour is read as aimed; and a lamp and a mat outside, which make the strip of corridor between the two doors a hall that the households share rather than a line between them. The remedy the tradition put first was the last one: neighbours who greet each other across a corridor are not reading it as a sha.

Fig. 02 The mirror war, in four. Two houses face each other across a lane, and the corner of one stands a little toward the other’s door. In the first panel a bagua mirror goes up over the door against the corner, which is what the paperbacks advise and what the tradition allowed against a ridge or a road; the neighbour, who did not have a corner until then, now has a mirror aimed at the house. In the second the neighbour answers, and two doors are armed. In the third the first house hangs a larger one, convex, on a practitioner’s advice, and the neighbour calls a practitioner too; Emmons found the mirror on the door the most common feng shui object in Hong Kong and the one most often hung against another household, and Bruun’s villages had the same quarrels over doors, heights and ridges, sometimes for years. Neither house is better off than before the first mirror. The fourth panel is the way out and it is what the older tradition did first: a plant set off the line of the corner, a curtain inside the door, and the two households talking, since the manuals’ own rule for a neighbour was to screen, never to point. A mirror aimed at a house is read as aimed, whatever it was hung for. Emmons 1992 for the Hong Kong survey; Bruun 2003 for the village disputes. The site’s mirrors guide gives the bagua mirror as an exterior deflector for roads and ridges, and this drawing is why it is not one for neighbours.

Fig. 03 One party wall, both sides of it. The tradition asks for a solid wall behind the bed and reads it as the tortoise, and in a flat the party wall is the most solid wall there is — which is how two households end up with their pillows a hand's breadth apart, each of them following the rule. The wall is solid to the hand and not to a voice: an older block's party wall passes a television, footsteps and speech well above the thresholds the World Health Organization gives for sleep and for daytime annoyance. On the right the same wall given to what does not mind a neighbour — the wardrobe, the bookshelves — and the bed moved to the far side of the room, which is the cheapest rule in the quiet guide and the tradition's own rule read properly. The WHO guidelines put disturbed sleep at about thirty decibels in the bedroom and daytime annoyance at about thirty-five; the noise scale in the quiet guide places the household's own sounds against both. Evans finds neighbour noise among the steadiest of the built environment's effects on wellbeing, and Gifford finds the neighbours above, below and either side the thing tower residents name most often. The one mitigation the research keeps finding is not drawn here because it cannot be: people who report better relations with the household through the wall also report less annoyance at their noise.

The shared flat 3 drawings

Fig. 01 The courtyard house, once and twice. A is the siheyuan as one household kept it, which the houses essay draws: the hall on the axis facing south across the court, the east and west wings for the sons’ families, the gate in the south-east corner, a single stove and a court left open, which is the whole point of the plan. B is the same house as the twentieth century in Beijing left most of them, a dazayuan, a big mixed courtyard, with a household in each wing and two in the hall, a stove at every door, lean-tos across the court for the kitchens and the stores, and the gate the one thing still shared. Knapp records the pattern across the old cities, and the households in it read their homes as the tradition reads any house: each wing had its own door, its own stove and its own bed against its own solid wall, and the court, which had been the household’s bright hall, was the street that everyone’s door opened onto. The shared flat is the dazayuan with the lean-tos taken away and the court roofed: a house per room, and a hall that is nobody’s and everybody’s. What the divided compound lost was not luck but the court, and the plan of a shared flat is a plan for keeping the hall. Knapp 2000 and 2005 for the courtyard house and its division; the term dazayuan is the Beijing one. Stoves in the lean-tos were the fire risk the city’s regulations chased for decades, which the fire guide reads.

1Each room a house: the bed with its head to the solid wall, the door seen from the pillow
2The desk at the window, light from the side, the back to a wall
3Each door a front door: a solid leaf, a lock, nothing stored against it inside
4The kitchen and the table the hall: a seat for each with a wall behind, the door seen from the head
5The bathroom door not onto the table · 6 The corridor lit and kept clear, the flat’s one street

Plan 02 A shared flat, read as three houses and a hall A flat of eleven metres by seven and a half with three bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room, shared by three adults who are not a family. The tradition’s reading of it is the compound’s: each room is a house, and the rooms the three share are the hall between the houses. Each bedroom is set as a house is set, the bed with its head to the solid wall and the door seen from the pillow, the desk at the window with the light from the side and a wall behind the chair, and the door treated as a front door, a solid leaf that closes and locks, with nothing stored against it inside. The kitchen and the table are the hall, and they are read as a hall: a seat for each of the three with a wall behind it, the head of the table seeing the door, the bathroom’s door not opening onto the table. The corridor is the flat’s one street, lit and kept clear, since it is the line every room’s door opens onto. Nothing in the plan needs the three to agree about feng shui; it needs them to agree that the kitchen is shared and the rooms are not, which is the compound’s rule and the one the tenancy already implies.

1Each room’s door is a front door: it locks, and it is closed when the tenant is out or asleep
2Each bed with a wall behind it and its own door in view: the command position, three times
3The shared table, with a chair for every tenant and a wall behind each
4The head of the table sees the door, as the hall’s head seat did
5The ghosted failure: two stools for three, so the third tenant eats standing or in their room
6The table cleared after each use; the kitchen unattended more than a family’s, so an alarm at the door

Plan 03 A flat of three lettings The compound’s two rules, drawn in the building that most often breaks them. The door first: a room in a shared flat is a house and its door is a front door, which means it locks, it is closed when the tenant is out and when the tenant is asleep, and nobody else opens it. That is what the doors between the wings of a compound were, and it is also what Evans’s review of housing and mental health measures, since crowding there is not people per room but the sense of being unable to withdraw, and a lockable room of one’s own removes most of the effect at any density. Each of the three rooms is therefore drawn as a small house: a door that locks, a bed with a wall behind it, the door in view from the pillow. The table second: a shared hall is a hall only if everyone in the house has a place in it. The table is drawn with a chair for each tenant, a wall behind each, and the door in view from the head, which is the tradition’s hall with the seats kept and the rank dropped. Ghosted beside it is the arrangement that fails, two stools for three, which turns the hall into one household’s wing and sends the third tenant to eat in their room. The kitchen carries an alarm because with three households cooking at different hours it stands unattended more than a family’s does.

A house, read from start to finish 3 drawings

Plan 01 The plot, walked before the door is opened: the four animals as the ground supplies them Ten metres by eight, two storeys, a front garden of eight metres to the road and a back garden rising two metres to a bank of mature trees, with the neighbours level either side. The road runs along the front, straight but not at the door, and the hedge and the eight metres keep it at a distance — which is the tradition's water passing and not charging the gate. The drawing is turned so the front of the house is at the bottom; the needle carries the real bearing, SE2 at a hundred and thirty-four degrees, so up the page is the sitting direction. The pond is the one thing on it the household asked for rather than the site supplying.

1The front door’s line runs through the hall to the back door
2The stair lands facing the front door
3The main bed has its head under the window and its feet to the door
4The hob stands beside the sink, with the back door in view of it
5The study is in the north, on the 5 · the desk goes to the east room instead

Fig. 02 The house, read: both floors in plan, north up, the facing to the south-east at the lower right, where the front door and the front garden are, and the ground rising behind the house to the north-west. The eight sectors are drawn from the centre of the plan and each carries the two stars of its palace from the chart built in the next drawing, the mountain star left and the water star right. The Form reading found five things, marked. The front door opens onto a hall whose line runs to the back door, the through-house; the stair lands facing the front door, which the hallways page calls the fault of the British terrace; the main bed upstairs has its head under the window and its feet to the door; the hob stands beside the sink with the back door in view of it; and the room the household meant for a study is in the north, where the chart puts the 5 and the window is smallest, so the desk goes to the east room instead. The north-west bedroom over the sitting, on the double 9, is the room the chart and the Form reading both give the main bed. A house of ten metres by eight, invented; the plan is drawn at twenty-four units to the metre. The sectors are the eight of the plan’s centre, not the twenty-four mountains; the chart is in the next drawing.

Fig. 03 The chart of the house: Period 9, because the house was built in 2024, sitting NW2 and facing SE2, because the compass read the front at a hundred and thirty-four degrees, Xun, the middle mountain of the south-east. It is built by the rules the Flying Stars essay gives and its chart builder draws: 9 at the centre flown forward for the period stars; the period star in the sitting palace, 1, taken as the mountain star and flown backward because Zi, the second mountain of the 1’s own palace, is yin; the period star in the facing palace, 8, taken as the water star and flown forward because Gen, the second mountain of its palace, is yang. The result is the chart the school calls double stars at the sitting: the ruling 9 as both mountain and water star in the north-west, at the back of the house, where the ground rises. The school reads it as strong for people and weak for wealth unless there is water at the back, and the pond it asks for goes between the house and the rise; the front, on the 2 and the spent 7, is kept quiet. Mountain star left, water star right, period star below, north up, the facing at the lower right. Sitting NW2 and facing SE2 are the middle mountains of Qian and Xun; a facing a few degrees either side would change the flight and the chart, which the facing guide’s void-line rule is for. The site labels the chart the Compass school’s; the walk found the bed’s room without it.

The restaurant and the café 2 drawings

Fig. 01 Which table a customer takes, ranked from the one chosen first to the one chosen last, as Robson’s review of the seating research and the Cornell studies with Kimes found it. The booth first, walls on three sides and the room in view, the table people ask for and keep longest; the wall table next, one seat with a wall behind it and the door in sight; the window table, liked by day for the street and avoided after dark when the glass becomes a black mirror with the room behind it; the screened floor table, an exposed table that a planter, a half wall or a change of level has turned into an anchored one, which is the whole of what a designer can do for the middle of a floor; the open floor table, nothing behind and traffic on every side, chosen last and left soonest; and the table at the door, by the pass or by the toilet, refused whenever there is a choice. Kimes and Robson measured the stays: parties at anchored tables sat longer and spent more per minute less, so that an owner who wants turnover puts the floor tables in and an owner who wants the evening trade puts the booths in, and both are reading the command position with a menu in it. Robson, Kimes, Becker and Evans measured the spacing: tables fifteen centimetres apart were rated crowded and left sooner than tables at thirty or sixty, and the difference was largest for couples. Robson 2002 for the review; Kimes and Robson 2004 and Robson, Kimes, Becker and Evans 2011 for the Cornell measurements, made in American casual restaurants. The tradition’s rule for the guest, a wall behind and the door in view, is the same ranking without the numbers.

1The door and its line: nothing in it, the room seen from the threshold and no table in the draught
2The till on the side wall toward the back, the door and the whole floor in view, a wall behind
3The anchored tables, against the walls and in the booths, chosen first and kept longest
4The exposed tables in the middle and at the door, chosen last, the ones a screen or a planter anchors
5The kitchen at the back with the pass, the stove out of the room’s view, the extractor’s hum away from the tables
6The toilet door screened from the tables · the altar or the tank at the side, never facing the door

Plan 02 A café, read by the two traditions at once A café of twelve metres by eight, its door on the street at the bottom, read by the manuals of the shop and by the seating research together, since they agree on nearly everything. The door’s line is kept clear, so that the room is seen from the threshold and no table sits in the draught the door makes. The till stands on the side wall toward the back, the workplaces guide’s rule, with the door and the whole floor in view and a wall behind the person at it. The tables along the walls and in the booths are the anchored tables that Robson’s review finds customers choose first and keep longest; the tables in the middle of the floor and the one at the door are the exposed ones, chosen last, and a screen, a planter or a half-height partition beside them turns them into anchored ones. The kitchen is at the back with its pass, the stove out of the room’s view and its extractor’s hum away from the tables. The toilet door is screened from the nearest table, and the altar to the god of wealth, or the tank that stands in for it, is on a side wall, facing into the room and never the door.

The classroom 2 drawings

1The gate on the axis, facing south, with the half-moon pool before it
2The first court, open, the students’ rooms along both sides
3The lecture hall across the axis, the master’s seat on its north wall
4The second court and the shrine to the master, or to Confucius, behind the hall
5The library at the back, two storeys, where the ground rises
6The kitchen and the stores off the axis, at the side

Plan 01 An academy on its axis A Confucian academy, shuyuan, of the kind founded from the Song to the Qing and surveyed by Knapp, drawn as a plan of relations and not of one place. Everything stands on one axis running north from the gate. The gate faces south with a half-moon pool before it, which the manuals prescribed for schools as for temples: still water at the front, the bright hall in a wall. The first court is open, with the students’ rooms in ranges along both sides, so that every room looks onto the court and none onto the outside. The lecture hall stands across the axis, its doors open to the court and the master’s seat on its north wall, which is the command position given to the teacher: the wall behind, the whole hall and the court in view, the students facing the master and the light from both sides. The second court holds the shrine to the academy’s founder or to Confucius, and the library stands at the back, two storeys, on the highest ground, which the tradition read as the tortoise behind the compound and the librarians read as the driest place for paper. The kitchen and the stores are off the axis, at the side, as in a house.

1The windows along the pupils’ left, high sills, blinds that cut the glare and not the light
2The teacher’s desk in the front corner, the wall behind, the door and every seat in view
3The door at the front on the corridor side, opening away from the board
4The board on the front wall, across the light; the wall around it plain
5The action zone, front and centre, where the questions are asked and answered; the seats rotated through it
6The pupils’ work on the back and side walls, the plants at the window

Plan 02 A classroom, read by both traditions A classroom of nine metres by seven for twenty-five pupils, drawn as the tradition and the classroom research would both have it. The windows run along the pupils’ left, so that a right-handed writer’s hand does not shadow the page, with sills high enough to keep the desks out of the street and blinds that cut the glare without cutting the light. The teacher’s desk stands in the front corner on the window side, the command position given to the one adult in the room: the wall behind, the door and every seat in view, the light from the side. The door is at the front on the corridor side and opens away from the board, so that a late pupil enters behind no one’s back but the teacher’s. The board is on the front wall, across the light and not against the window, where it would be a silhouette. The rows hold the action zone, front and centre, the seats that ask and answer most, which the classroom studies found and the site suggests rotating pupils through. The pupils’ own work goes on the back and side walls and the plants at the window; the front wall is kept plain, since the research finds the busy wall behind the board costs attention. Nothing on the plan is a cure; it is the students’ desk guide multiplied by twenty-five.

The shop 3 drawings

1The mouth, off the axis, opening into the shop and not onto a wall
2The landing inside it, the bright hall of the manuals and the strip the cameras found nobody looks at
3The drift to the right, and the first table set in it
4The counter in command, a wall behind it and the door in view
5The god of wealth on the side wall, facing in, never at the door
6The stock door, out of the customer’s line and kept shut

Plan 01 A shop, read twice A shop of eight metres by six, read by the commercial manuals and by the shopping research together, with the street at the foot of the plan. The mouth is the door and the manuals ask it to open into the room rather than onto a wall or a pillar, and to stand off the middle of the frontage so that what enters turns rather than runs; inside it they ask for a bright hall, a clear stretch that the shop does not sell from, which is the same strip Underhill's cameras found customers walking through without registering what stands on it. The tradition then wants the path to wind, and the research finds it winding already, to the right: the dashed line is the drift, and the table a few paces in and to the right of the door is what catches it, which a retail consultant calls the power display and the manuals would call the thing that turns the qi. The counter stands at the back on the side away from the door's line, with the wall behind it and the whole shop and the door in view — the fine dashed line is that sightline — which is the command position given to the person who must see everyone; the till is on the counter and the god of wealth shelf is on the side wall facing into the room, never facing the door, since a god who watches the door watches the money leave. The stock door is at the back and out of the customer's line. Nothing on this plan is a promise about takings: it is a room arranged so that a customer can see what is for sale and the shopkeeper can see the customer.

Fig. 02 What the door opens onto The same shop with the same mouth, and the four things that are usually behind it. In the first the door opens onto floor, and the floor a few paces in is left clear, which is the bright hall the manuals ask for and the strip the shopping research found customers walk through without registering; the dashed line is the walk in, and it bends. In the second a wall or a partition stands a pace inside the door, so that the mouth is open from the street and shut from the inside. In the third the obstacle is a display unit with its back to the door, which is the commonest version of the same fault and the hardest to see, because from behind the counter it looks like a shop full of goods. In the fourth the door and the back door stand on one axis, which is the chuan tang, the piercing hall, and the manuals read it as what comes in going straight out again; the remedy is to offset one of the two doors or to put something across the line, not to shut the back door. Nothing here is measured against takings; what is drawn is what a person coming through the door meets.

Fig. 03 The till, twice, in a shop of five metres by four with its door and window on the street. A: the counter where the commercial manuals put it, on the side wall toward the back, so that the person at it sees the door and the whole shop without standing in the door’s line, has a solid wall behind, and has the floor of the shop, the bright hall, in front; the customer arrives across the open floor and the goods are between the door and the till. B: the counter where most shops put it, just inside the door with its back to the window, so that the person at it has the street behind them, cannot see who comes in without turning, and stands in the line from the door to the back of the shop; the manuals read it as the mouth of the business blocked and the till exposed, and the retailer reads it as a counter that gets in the way of the door and a back to the pavement. The tradition’s till is the command position with a cash drawer. The arrangement is the one Emmons’s Hong Kong shopkeepers described consulting a geomancer for, and the one Bruun records in the commercial manuals: the till off the door’s line, backed, and seeing the door, with water or a plant between it and the entrance if the school allows. Scale 40 units to the metre.

The balcony 3 drawings

1The door, from the room the household uses most
2The clearance a chair needs behind it, which a metre twenty has not got
3The seat with the flat’s own wall behind it, and the route out that turns before it
4The rail planted along its length, with one stretch left clear opposite the seat
5The one tall plant, on the side the afternoon sun comes from

Fig. 01 The same balcony at two depths Three metres forty of frontage, drawn at a metre twenty and at a metre eighty. On the left, the depth most flats were given: the pots along the rail work, the drying rack works, and the table and two chairs, ghosted, do not — the hatched band is the clearance a person needs to pass behind an occupied chair, and it runs off the edge of the balcony. What that depth can be is a windowsill at a larger scale, and treated as one it is useful. On the right, the depth at which the tradition's rules for a room start to apply: the seat stands against the flat's own wall with the view in front of it rather than the drop behind it, the table is between the seat and the rail, and there is still room to walk past. The plant a pace out from the door turns the arrival, so that the balcony is come round to rather than faced square, which is the scholar's garden's device at the smallest scale it will work at. The rail is planted along its length except for one stretch opposite the seat, which frames the one thing worth looking at and hides the rest. Nothing here is a rule of the manuals, which have no chapter on balconies; the depth is a design observation and the seat is the command position, which the site distinguishes.

1The rail at a hundred and ten, which is a standing person’s waist
2The seated eye at a hundred and fifteen, five centimetres above it
3The standing eye at a hundred and sixty, well clear of it
4The planting, which puts the wall back at the height the seated eye is at

Fig. 02 The rail, and the two eye lines The rail of a balcony drawn in elevation from inside, at the three heights that decide what it does. The horizontal dashed lines are the eye heights this site uses throughout, a seated eye at a hundred and fifteen centimetres and a standing eye at a hundred and sixty; the rail is at a hundred and ten, which is roughly a standing person's waist and about where the building codes settle. Those three numbers are the whole drawing. A solid rail gives real enclosure and takes light off the floor, which tells on a shallow balcony and on a low storey. A glass rail keeps every bit of the light and gives no enclosure whatever, so that a person sitting behind one is sitting in the open; frosting it loses the light without giving back the shelter, and planting along its inner face is the usual answer. A railing of bars is the old compromise, and the one the pots work with, because they sit on the inside edge and the wall builds itself over a season. What the three have in common is where the rail top falls: five centimetres under the seated eye, which is why a balcony can feel enclosed standing up and exposed sitting down, and why the planting goes at the seated eye and not where a standing person judges it should.

1The door between the room and the balcony, which stays in both
2Where outside begins, which is the whole of the difference
3The air, through one opening or through two in series
4The low winter sun, which reaches the same distance in and through one pane more

Fig. 03 Open, and glazed A living room of three and a half metres with a balcony of one metre eighty, cut lengthways, two sixty from floor to ceiling and the storey above roofing the balcony. Open, on the left, the boundary of the flat is the wall with the balcony door in it, the balcony is outside, and the air reaching the living room has crossed one opening. Glazed, on the right, the boundary has moved out to the rail, the balcony is a small room with a door onto another room, and the air now comes through two openings in series, which is what the air guide's figures are worth reading against. The low winter sun is drawn at the same angle in both, grazing the soffit of the balcony above and reaching about sixty centimetres past the door; glazing does not shorten it, it takes a share of it at every pane. Nothing here says do not glaze a balcony. It says what is being exchanged, which is an outdoor room for an indoor one, and that the households in the shophouse essay who roofed over their sky-wells for floor space are the ones who bought air conditioners first.

The guest room 3 drawings

1The bed under what is on it, which is where a spare room ends up
2The reach from the pillow, a light and a surface within it
3Somewhere to put a bag that is not the floor and not the bed
4The working half kept off the sleeping half, by a screen or by the floor

Fig. 02 One spare room, three states A room of three metres twenty by two sixty, which is about the size most spare rooms are, drawn in the three states they are found in. On the left the room nobody sleeps in and nothing defends: the bed is still there under the boxes, the clothes horse and the chair with the pile on it, and the door is kept shut. Every household generates objects with no place, and a spare room is the only room with no daily use to argue back. In the middle the same room made ready, which takes four things and not a scheme — the bed with its head in the corner and a solid wall behind it, a light and a surface within reach of the pillow, somewhere to put a suitcase that is not the floor, and two empty hangers. On the right the honest case, which is a room that works all year as a study and is a guest room a dozen nights: the desk under the window, the bed along the wall, and the two uses kept on their own halves of the floor rather than piled on each other, because a guest sleeping among somebody else's work sleeps as a trespasser. Nothing here is a rule of the manuals, which never had a spare room; the bed's position is the command position and the rest is arithmetic.

1The foot of the double, which is where the door opens into it
2The floor a single gives back, which is what the room was short of
3The door in view from the pillow, which both beds keep

Fig. 03 The bed it is given, and the bed it has room for The same spare room of three metres twenty by two sixty, with the two beds it is usually offered. A double of one forty by two metres, centred on the far wall, leaves about fifty-five centimetres down one side and sixty at the foot, where the door opens; the bed can be got into and nothing else can happen in the room, and a suitcase ends up on the bed. A single of ninety by two, along the side wall with its head in the corner, gives back two metres and more of clear floor, which is enough for a bedside table, a bench for a bag and a chair, and it is what most guests actually need. The household that puts in a double because a couple came once has furnished for the rarer case. Both keep the head against a solid wall and the door in view from the pillow, which is the command position and the part that does not bend; the tinted floor is what is left to stand, walk and put things on.