Guides · Water · 11 min read · Updated September 2026

Water features

Water is the tradition’s word for wealth and its most argued-over object. Where a pond, a fountain or a fish tank belongs and where it does not; the shapes of water the texts read, embracing and cutting; the pool behind the house that the manuals never saw; the damp and the sound water brings indoors; the fish and their numbers; and what water does in a room that the tradition never claims for it.

Oriented N 006°

Water

Fig. 01 A rippling dark surface. The tradition wants water in front of the house, still or moving toward it, and never behind.

Water is half the tradition’s name. Feng shui is wind and water, and the oldest sentence in the literature is about the second: qi is scattered by wind and held by water. Every rule about ponds, fountains and fish tanks descends from that sentence, and so does the modern habit of calling water wealth. This guide gives the placements the manuals agree on, the ones they argue about, the shapes of water the texts read from a house, the pool the manuals never saw, and the two things water does in a room that the tradition never claims for it, one good and one to be managed.

In front, and to the left

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.

Tradition · Held by water

The Zangshu says that qi rides the wind and scatters, and meets water and stops, and the whole Form School follows from it: a good site has water before it, because water is where qi gathers. In the landform reading the water is a river or a lake in front of the site, curving toward it and leaving by a narrow mouth; in the garden it is a pond, a basin or a birdbath in the front garden, visible from the door, still or moving gently toward the house. The manuals place it to the dragon side, the house’s left as it looks out, which is the right of a north-up plan of a south-facing house, and they place nothing behind the house, where water reads as the ground giving way beneath the tortoise. Paton’s translation gives the passage; Skinner, Wong and Too give the garden; the yin house page draws the valley the rule was made for.

The shapes of water

The Form School reads water by its shape as it reads hills, and the text for it is the Shuilong Jing, the Water Dragon Classic, a treatise on the plains where there are no mountains and the watercourses do all the work of the landform. Its drawings are of rivers bending, and the bend is everything. A river that curves round a site with its belly toward the house holds the house in its arm; the tradition calls the shape the jade belt, reads it as qi gathered, and gives the house the view of it. The same river with its back to the house, curving away, is the reverse bow, listed among the faults on the sha page: the water turns from the site, and the current runs hardest at the bank the house stands on, which is also where a river erodes. The drawing gives both, and a third shape the texts did not have.

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.

The third is the swimming pool. The manuals objected to water behind a house long before anyone dug a pool there, and the suburban plan, with the pool in the back garden, is the one they would least have chosen; the objection is the tortoise’s, that the ground behind the house should be solid. Where the pool is there, the manuals of the last thirty years, Too’s in particular, add two things: that its shape should be rounded or kidney-shaped rather than a rectangle with a corner aimed at the house, since a corner is a corner whatever it is made of, and that there should be something between the pool and the house, a terrace, planting, a low wall, so that the back of the house has ground before it has water. Neither is classical. Both are the classical eye applied to a new object, and the rounded pool is also the one that is easier to keep and safer to walk round.

Indoors

Inside the house the manuals allow water in small amounts and few places. A bowl, a small fountain or a tank inside the entrance, to the side of the door rather than in its line, is the classical placement, the ming tang given its water. An aquarium in the living room, where people gather, is the second. Both are asked to be clean, moving or fresh, and modest; a tank that dominates a room is Water drowning the rest, and a tank of two hundred litres in a small flat is a radiator of damp.

The placements the manuals refuse are consistent. Not in the bedroom, where Water is too yin for a room already yin and the sound and the damp disturb the sleeper. Not beside the stove, where Water and Fire meet and the tradition’s oldest quarrel is staged on a worktop. Not in the kitchen at all, in most of the manuals, and not in a bathroom, which is Water already and needs no more.

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.

The four rooms in the drawing are the manuals’ two placements and two refusals. A bowl or a small fountain inside the front door, to one side of it and not in its line, gives the entrance its water without putting water where the visitor walks. A tank in the living room, against a solid wall and seen from the seats, gives the gathering room something alive to look at, which is what the research below says an aquarium does. The bedroom and the stove’s side are the two places the manuals refuse in every edition, and the ghosted tanks show why: one puts moving water beside a sleeper, the other beside a flame.

What water does

The damp it brings

The thing the manuals do not say about indoor water is the thing a surveyor would say first. An open tank, a fountain or a bowl puts water into the air of a room by the litre a week, and in a small, cool or poorly ventilated room that water ends on the coldest surface, the window, the outside wall, the corner behind the tank. The World Health Organization’s guidelines on damp and mould find the association with respiratory illness consistent, and the remedy is the one the bathroom page gives: ventilation, and a room that dries. A tank with a lid loses far less than one without; a fountain that runs for an hour in the evening loses less than one that runs all day; a bowl on a windowsill in a north room is a bowl that feeds the mould on the frame. The tradition’s rule that indoor water be modest is, read this way, a rule about humidity, and it is a good one.

Keeping it

Still water must be clean, or it is the tradition’s stagnant qi made literal and the mosquito’s favourite room. Moving water should be quiet enough not to be heard from the bedroom, and a pump can be put on a timer. A tank needs fish that live; the manuals’ counts of them, nine with one black, or eight gold and one black, are the Black Sect’s and popular, and the classical rule is only that nothing in the water be dead. A dripping tap, which the manuals read as wealth leaking away, is a dripping tap; the reading is a figure and the plumber is the remedy. Outside, a pond needs a depth that does not freeze solid and a margin the birds can drink from, and it should be seen from the door and the main seat, which is where the tradition put it in the first place.

Checklist

Outside: in front of the house, to its left as it looks out, still or moving toward it, and its bend embracing the house rather than turning from it
Nothing behind the house; where a pool is there, rounded, with ground and planting between it and the house
Inside: a small bowl or fountain by the entrance, to the side of the door; a modest tank where people gather, against a solid wall
Not in the bedroom, not beside the stove, not in the bathroom
Clean if still, quiet if moving, alive if stocked, lidded if large
The room that holds it ventilated, and dry an hour later
Fix the tap