Learn · The city · 15 min read · Updated September 2026

Feng shui in the city

The tradition was written for hills and it is practised, today, mostly in towers. How Hong Kong read its two banks and the block built between them; the holes left through buildings for the dragon; the theme park whose gate was turned twelve degrees; the compensation a government pays for a disturbed hillside; what the city’s reading has in common with the planner’s view corridors and wind paths; and which of the famous stories are true.

Oriented W 255°

Metal

Fig. 01 Towers on the water. The city reads its skyline the way the villages read their hills, and argues about it in the same words.

The classics were written for a house with a hill behind it, and the place where the tradition is most alive is a city of a thousand towers on a rock. Hong Kong reads its skyline as the villages read their valleys, with the same four animals and the same catalogue of lines, and its readings have shaped bank towers, hotels, a theme park and the accounts of a government. This essay gives the famous cases as they can be verified, draws two of them, and says what the city’s reading has in common with the planner’s language of corridors, setbacks and wind, which is more than either side admits.

The bank, the tower and the shield

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.

The story every visitor is told is true in its outline and embroidered in its details, and the drawing gives the outline. The bank that opened on Statue Square in 1985, Norman Foster’s building for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, was built with its ground floor left open beneath the structure, its square before it and the harbour beyond, and the bank consulted a practitioner during the design, which was reported at the time and has been repeated since; the two bronze lions of 1935 were set back in front of it facing the water, and the escalators inside were set at an angle to the entrance, which the city read as the practitioner’s doing. Five years later I. M. Pei’s tower for the Bank of China rose to the east, a shaft of triangular prisms with sharp edges, and the city read the edges as knives: one aimed at the older bank, one up the hill at Government House. The governor of the day had willow trees planted in the line of the second, which was reported and is the one certain fact in the story; the older bank’s roof gantries, read as cannons trained back on the tower, are the folklore that grew round it. In 1999 the block between the two, the Cheung Kong Centre, was built square with blunt corners, and its owners’ advisers described it to the press as a shield. Bruun’s history gives the episode as the moment the tradition became visible in a modern city’s architecture, and Emmons’s survey, taken in the middle of it, found the city’s businesses consulting practitioners as a matter of course.

The dragon gate

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.

The city’s most visible reading is a hole. On the coast between Repulse Bay and Stanley several towers stand with a gap of four or five storeys left through them, and the explanation the city gives, and the developers print, is that the dragon of the hill behind must be able to reach the water in front, and a building across its line must leave it a gate; the practitioners call the form a dragon gate, long men, and the four animals essay gives the dragon veins the reading descends from. The flats the gap would have held are not built, which in that market is a large sum, and the developers have judged that the buyers pay it back. A designer reads the same gap as a view corridor for the flats behind, a wind path through a wall of towers on a hot coast, and a break in a slab that would otherwise be a dam; Hong Kong’s own planning department, after the epidemic of 2003, began to require air ventilation assessments for large developments, which is the dragon gate written as a regulation. The choosing a flat guide reads the same walls from inside.

Design observation · Corridors, setbacks and wind

Mak and Ng asked architects in Hong Kong and Sydney to rate the Form school’s principles for a house and found broad agreement with most of them, on both sides of the world, once the animals were translated into siting; Lynch’s image of the city, the paths, edges, nodes and landmarks by which people read a place, is the planner’s reading of what the practitioners call the dragon’s line and the bright hall. A view corridor is a line kept open; a setback is a bright hall kept before a building; a wind assessment is the tradition’s objection to a wall across the water’s breath, measured. The vocabularies were made for different purposes and they draw the same plan, and a city that argues in one can usually be understood in the other.

The gate turned twelve degrees

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.

The park that opened on Lantau in 2005, Hong Kong Disneyland, was designed with a practitioner’s advice, and its owners said so: the main entrance was turned twelve degrees from the axis the plan first gave it, a bend was put in the walkway from the station so that qi would not run straight out to the sea, the hotels have no fourth floors, and the cash registers were placed by the reading; the accounts were given by the company at the opening and reported widely. The park is the clearest case of a Western corporation adopting the reading as a courtesy to its market, and it did no harm to a plan that needed a bend in a walkway anyway. Across the region the same courtesy is ordinary: the Fountain of Wealth at Singapore’s Suntec City, a ring in the palm of five towers laid out as a hand, was designed to the reading in 1995 and is sold on it; the floors that skip the fours, which the numbers essay gives, are the courtesy at the scale of a lift panel.

Evidence · What the city pays for it

The city’s reading has a price and the price has been measured. Chau, Ma and Ho found the flats on Hong Kong’s lucky floors selling at a premium, larger in a boom; Fortin and colleagues found the same digits priced in Vancouver’s Chinese neighbourhoods. The Hong Kong government has for decades paid compensation to the villages of the New Territories for the disturbance of their feng shui by roads, railways and reservoirs, a line in the public works accounts that treats a hillside’s reading as a property right, and the practice is older than the skyscrapers. Gifford’s review of high-rise living, which the flat guide gives, is the one body of research on the towers themselves, and its findings, that height costs families and pays the childless, are what a practitioner reading a tower for a client would say in another language. None of it shows that a dragon gate brings fortune. All of it shows that a city which believes it will, builds it.

Misconception · The skyscrapers were designed by feng shui

Most of them were not, and the famous ones least of all. The Bank of China tower was designed without a practitioner, and its architect said so; the readings that made it famous were the city’s, made after the fact, and the willows and the shield were the responses of other people. The older bank did consult a practitioner, but its open ground floor and its angled escalators were decisions its architects have given their own reasons for. What the cases show is not that the towers obey the tradition but that the city reads them by it, loudly, in the press and the property market, and that owners and governments answer the reading because it is heard. The tradition in the city is a public language for judging buildings, and a building that ignores it is judged all the same.

The axis, measured

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.

The largest thing the tradition ever drew is a line, and the drawing above gives it. The central axis of Beijing runs seven point eight kilometres from the Yongding Gate of the outer city at the south to the Bell Tower at the north, laid in the 1420s by the Yongle emperor’s planners over the line of the Yuan capital and kept by every dynasty and regime since; Steinhardt gives its layers and Schinz its cosmology, and in 2024 it was inscribed on the World Heritage list as a single work, which is what it is. Everything of consequence in the capital stands on it or faces it in pairs. The Temple of Heaven and the Altar of Agriculture flank it in the outer city, the emperor’s two winter and spring duties east and west of his road; the Zhengyang Gate carries the line into the inner city, Tiananmen into the imperial city and the Meridian Gate into the palace, wall within wall within wall, which the houses essay finds in the courtyard house at a hundredth of the scale; the three halls of the Forbidden City stand on the line with the throne in the Hall of Supreme Harmony facing south at the centre of the whole, so that the emperor sat as the elders sat in the hall of a farmhouse; and 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 four animals essay’s tortoise built by hand, sixty metres high, where the plain had none. Beyond it the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower close the line, and the hours were struck from them across the whole city. The axis is the Form School’s sentence, back to the hill and face to the open ground, drawn at the scale of an empire and read from the throne; a reader who wants to know what the tradition looked like when it had unlimited money and six hundred years should walk it, from the south, as the emperor’s visitors did, and count the gates.

Reading a city, in order

The hill and the water. Find the district’s tortoise and its water, the Peak and the harbour, the ridge and the river; every reading in the city descends from them.
The face and the back of a tower. Which way the building addresses, what stands behind it, what its ground floor does; a tower is a hill someone built.
The lines. Edges, corners and slits between buildings, read as the sha catalogue reads them, and answered with distance, planting or a blunt face.
The gaps. View corridors, wind paths and dragon gates are one thing under three names; keep them open.
The market. The digits, the floors and the readings are priced; know what the neighbourhood pays for and what it does not.
The stories, sorted. The willows are true, the cannons are folklore, the twelve degrees are documented; the city’s cases are worth exactly as much as their sources.