Learn · Elsewhere · 14 min read · Updated September 2026

Siting elsewhere

Every building culture wrote down how to choose a site and turn a house, and feng shui is the one the West learned the word for. The sand divination the word geomancy really meant and how the missionaries misapplied it; the vastu of India, a man lying in a square with a deity at every corner; Vitruvius on the healthy site, the winds and the rooms by their aspect, written in Rome before Christ; what the three traditions agree on, which is most of the sensible part; and what only the Chinese one did.

Oriented NE 045°

Earth

Fig. 01 A courtyard in the Indian manner, open at its centre. The vastu treatises leave the centre for Brahma; the Chinese manuals leave it for the sky. The same house, from two cosmologies.

The beyond China essay follows feng shui to the countries that borrowed it; this one sets it beside the traditions that never did. Every culture that built in the sun and the wind wrote down how to choose a site and which way to turn a house, and three of the texts survive well enough to compare: the Indian vastu shastra, a cosmic man lying in a square with a deity at each corner and a use to each direction; Vitruvius’s On Architecture, written in Rome before Christ, with a chapter on the healthy site and one on which rooms face which way; and the Arabic sand divination the West called geomancy, which is where the word the missionaries gave feng shui actually comes from. This essay gives the word and its sand, the man in the square, the Roman’s aspects, what all three agree on, and the one thing the Chinese tradition did that the others did not.

The word, and the sand

The West met feng shui with a word already in use, and the word was wrong. Geomancy in Latin and then in English meant a specific thing from the twelfth century on: a divination by marks made in sand or on paper, sixteen figures of dots read in a chart, which Hugh of Santalla translated from the Arabic ‘ilm al-raml, the science of the sand, in the 1140s and which every European court and country fair practised for five hundred years; Skinner’s history of it gives the figures, the charts and the lineage from the Sahara to Elizabethan London. It has nothing to do with sites. It answers questions, as the Yijing answers them, by a randomised figure and a table, and the earth in its name is the sand the figure is drawn in. When the missionaries of the nineteenth century needed a word for what the Chinese did with hills and compasses, they reached for the one that had earth in it, and Eitel’s book of 1873 fixed the misnomer; Needham kept it with a caveat, and the site keeps it with the glossary’s. The distinction matters because it is the distinction the whole site rests on: a divination answers a question about the future by chance, and a siting practice answers a question about the ground by looking at it, and the Chinese tradition has both in it, the compass schools leaning toward the first and the Form school being the second. The West’s geomancy was all divination and no ground; feng shui at its best was all ground and no divination, and the word joined them by mistake.

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.

India: the man in the square

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.

India’s siting tradition is older than China’s manuals and more thoroughly a cosmology, and the drawing above sets its map beside the bagua. The vastu shastra, the science of dwelling, is a body of Sanskrit treatises from the first millennium, the Manasara and the Mayamata among them, and its instrument is the vastu purusha mandala: a square divided into a grid, most often nine by nine, across which a cosmic man lies face down with his head to the north-east, pinned there by the gods at the beginning of things, and every cell of the grid is his body and a deity’s seat. The centre, Brahma’s, is kept open, which is why the Indian house has a courtyard as the Chinese house does; the north-east, where the head lies, is the place of water and prayer; the east is the sun’s and the entrance’s; the south-east is fire’s, and the kitchen; the south-west is the heaviest corner, walled thick, where the master sleeps and the stores are kept; the north-west is the wind’s, for guests and whatever moves; the north is wealth’s, kept light. Chakrabarti’s study gives the treatises and what the modern Indian architect makes of them, which is a great deal: the vastu consultant is the Indian feng shui master, hired for the same reasons and by the same clients, and the hiring guide’s advice transfers whole. Set beside the bagua, the mandala agrees on the south-west as the heavy, earthen, sheltered corner and on the wind in the north-west, and differs by a forty-five-degree turn on fire and water, south-east and north-east in India, south and north in China. The house at the end of both is the same house: a walled square open at the centre, heavy at the back, light at the front, entered from the sunny side, with the fire kept to one corner and the water to another.

Design observation · Two grids, one plan

A designer who has drawn a courtyard house for a Chinese client and a vastu-compliant one for an Indian client has drawn the same plan twice with different words on the drawing. Both want the centre open; both want the kitchen in a fixed corner with the fire kept from the water; both put the sleeping rooms on the heavy, shaded side and the receiving rooms on the sunny one; both fix the entrance by direction and refuse it on the axis or in the wrong corner; both dislike a bathroom at the centre and a bed under a beam. The differences are the corners the fire and the water take and the cosmology that explains them, and neither difference changes the section, the daylight or the way the house is walked. A reader who wants to know how much of a siting tradition is climate and how much is culture can lay the two grids on one plan and count what moves.

Rome: the site, the winds and the aspect

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 West had its own siting manual, and it is older than any Chinese one that survives whole. Vitruvius wrote On Architecture in Rome about twenty years before Christ, for Augustus, and its first book gives the choice of a site in terms the Book of Burial would recognise: a healthy site is high, not misty, not marshy, facing neither the hot quarters nor the cold, and the test he proposes, to inspect the livers of the animals that graze there, is the reading of the ground by the animals that live on it. The same book lays out a town’s streets to break the eight winds he names on his wind rose, so that no street is a channel for one, which is the through-house fault at the scale of a city and the sha essay’s road-rush answered with geometry. The sixth book turns the house by its rooms, and the ring above gives it beside the courtyard house: winter dining rooms and baths to the south-west, for the low evening sun of the short days; bedrooms and libraries to the east, for the morning and to keep the books from the damp south wind; dining rooms for spring and autumn east too; summer dining rooms, picture galleries and painters’ studios to the north, for a light that does not change through the day. Where the Chinese manuals turn a house by the household’s rank and the year’s direction, the hall to the elders, the wings to the sons, Vitruvius turns it by the room’s use and the season, and the two agree where the sun makes them: the principal room on the sunny side, the stores on the dark one, the workroom in the steady light. Alberti took the chapter into the Renaissance and every treatise after him repeated it; the windows guide’s rule for which side a window goes is Vitruvius’s aspect chart, kept by a profession that had forgotten who wrote it.

Evidence · What the three agreed on, and what the research says of it

The three traditions agree on a short list: the high, dry site over the marsh; the back to the cold wind; the principal room to the sun; the water kept from the fire and the sleeping kept from the door; the centre open. The research on each is the site’s ordinary evidence. Appleton’s prospect and refuge is the back to the wind and the face to the open; the daylight studies the student’s desk guide cites are the principal room to the sun; the damp guidance the bathroom page cites is the marsh refused; the sleep research is the bed away from the door and the light. Three cultures that never read each other arrived at one list because they were reading one sun, and the list is the part of feng shui the site is surest of, for the same reason.

Misconception · Feng shui is the Chinese vastu

The comparison is made by both trades, each to borrow the other’s clients, and it is half right. The two are siting traditions with a grid, a set of directions, a fixed corner for fire and a consultant at the door, and the half that is right is the half the essay gives. What is wrong is the assumption that the maps are the same map: the mandala’s fire and water sit a forty-five-degree turn from the bagua’s, its centre belongs to a god and the bagua’s to the earth, and its rules are cast in a cosmic body where the Chinese rules are cast in a landscape. A vastu consultant reading a house by the bagua, or a feng shui master reading it by the mandala, has read it by the wrong book, and a client who is offered both should ask which of the two the practitioner actually learned.

What only the Chinese tradition did

The Indian and the Roman traditions turn a house on a site; the Chinese tradition reads the site, and the difference is the one thing the comparison leaves feng shui with that the others do not have. The mandala is laid on a plot however the plot lies, and Vitruvius chooses a healthy site and then builds by the rooms; neither reads the hills. The Form school read them first and the house second, and its sentence, the back to the hill, the water in front, the arms either side, the approach turned, is a description of a landscape that the four animals essay gives and the dragon veins essay follows back to its source, and it has no equivalent in Sanskrit or Latin. Yoon, comparing the Korean practice with its neighbours, finds the same: the East Asian tradition is a landscape reading before it is a house rule, and that is what it exported to Korea and Japan and what the West, which had Vitruvius already, found new in it in 1873. A reader who has the vastu grid or the Roman aspects has most of the sensible part of feng shui already and can check the houses essay for the rest; what the Chinese tradition adds is the walk up the ridge before the compass comes out, and the site’s choosing a home guide is that walk, done for a flat.

Siting, in every tradition

The high, dry site. Over the marsh and out of the mist; Vitruvius’s first rule, the Book of Burial’s and the vastu treatises’.
The back to the wind. A hill, a wall, a heavy corner behind; the tortoise, the south-west of the mandala, the Roman wind rose broken by the streets.
The principal room to the sun. The hall facing south, the winter dining room south-west, the receiving rooms on the sunny side of the square.
The fire in its corner, the water in its. South-east and north-east in India, south and north in China, the kitchen and the bath kept apart in both and in Rome.
The centre open. Brahma’s seat, the courtyard, the atrium; a house is a wall round a piece of sky.
The entrance by direction. Never on the axis, never in the wrong corner; the east in India, the south-east in China, off the wind in Rome.
And the ridge, in China only. The walk up the hill behind before the compass comes out; the part the comparison leaves feng shui with.