Learn · The gods · 14 min read · Updated September 2026

The household gods

The house the tradition read was also a house with gods in it, and the two were arranged together. Who the gods of a Chinese household are, the door gods on the leaves, the Kitchen God above the stove, the earth lord at the floor, the heaven official at the post, the ancestors on the shelf and the bed mother at the child’s bed; where each stands and why; the altar’s own feng shui, in heights; what the anthropologists found the gods were for; and what a house without gods keeps of the arrangement.

Oriented S 180°

Fire

Fig. 01 A door dressed for the year. The gods of the house begin at its threshold, and the tradition pasted them there.

The classical house had residents who did not sleep in it. Gods stood at its door, above its stove, on its floor and on its wall of honour, and the dead of the family sat on a shelf and were fed; the practitioner who read the house read it with them in place, and the rules for the altar are the oldest rules the tradition has for where a thing should stand. This essay gives the household’s gods as the anthropologists found them, where each stands and why, the altar’s own feng shui with its heights, and what a house without gods keeps of the arrangement, which is more than it thinks.

Gods, ghosts and ancestors

A Chinese household deals with three kinds of spirit and tells them apart by what it offers and where. Wolf’s essay of 1974 gave the sorting its classic form: gods are officials, addressed with the deference due to a magistrate and fed at the front of the house; ancestors are kin, fed at the family’s own table and shelf; ghosts are strangers, the dead with no family to feed them, fed outside the door at the seventh month so that they go away. Feuchtwang reads the whole pantheon as an empire in miniature, the imperial metaphor, in which the Kitchen God is a reporting clerk, the earth god the governor of a ground, and the Jade Emperor the throne, and the household’s ritual year is a round of audiences and reports. Jordan’s village in Taiwan and Ahern’s cult of the dead give the same picture from the ground: the gods on the shelf, the tablets beside them, the earth god at the gate, and a family that knows exactly which is which. The picture matters to feng shui because the tradition’s house was arranged for these residents before it was arranged for the living, and the rules the site gives for the bed and the desk were given first to the altar.

Tradition · The gods of a house, in order

At the door, the door gods, men shen, on the two leaves: in most of China the Tang generals Qin Shubao and Yuchi Gong, who stood guard over the emperor’s sleep, and in the older form Shentu and Yulei of the Han; above the stove, the Kitchen God, Zao Jun, who watches the household all year and reports on it to heaven in the last week of the twelfth month; on the floor inside the door, in the south, the earth lord, di zhu, the god of the ground the house stands on, in a red shrine facing out; on the post outside, the heaven official, tian guan, who bestows blessings from above; on the wall of honour, the household’s chosen deities, Guanyin, Guan Gong, Mazu by the coast, on the altar’s own left, and the ancestors’ tablet on its right; and at the child’s bed, in Fujian and Taiwan, the bed mother, chuang mu, who guards the sleeping infant. Knapp records the whole company from province to province with the papers, the couplets and the charms that go with it, and the house through the year essay gives the days on which each is attended to.

Where each stands

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.

The gods have places, and the places are a plan of the house’s meaning. The threshold is guarded, the stove is watched, the ground is owned, the sky is asked, the wall of honour is honoured, the child is protected: a household that keeps its gods has, without a compass, marked every station the tradition later argued about. The altar goes on the wall opposite the door and faces it, so that the gods see who comes in and whoever comes in sees the gods first, which is the front door guide’s first sight and the living room guide’s wall of honour in their original use. The Kitchen God faces out into the kitchen from above the stove, watching the fire and the family that cooks on it, which is why the kitchen page treats the stove as watched. The earth lord sits at floor level because he is the ground, and faces the door because the ground meets the street there; the heaven official hangs outside on the post because the sky is outside. Nothing faces the bathroom, which the tradition read as the house’s one unclean room, nothing stands under a beam, and the altar’s back is to a solid wall that is not the bathroom’s: the same three rules the site gives for a bed, applied a century or two earlier to the gods.

The altar’s own feng shui

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.

The altar is the one piece of furniture the tradition measured before the practitioners measured anything, and the drawing gives it in elevation with the heights the Hong Kong and Taiwanese practitioners give. 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, so that the gods are looked up to from a chair and level with the eye from the floor; the offering table below it at eighty, the height of any table, carries the fruit and the tea. The gods stand on the altar’s own left and the ancestors on its right, which is the right and the left as one faces it, the dragon side for the deities and the tiger side for the dead, in the order the four animals essay explains and the Book of Rites gives for the eastern and western steps of a hall. A burner stands before each, since gods and ancestors are not fed from one bowl, and a pair of red lamps flank the shelf and are kept lit. The rules about what the altar must not do are the familiar ones: not under a beam, not with its back to a bathroom or a kitchen wall, not facing a lavatory door or the stove, not in a bedroom, not under a stair; the beams guide gives the beam and the bathroom page the wall. In a flat the altar becomes a cabinet on the same wall at the same height, and the earth lord’s shrine goes inside the front door where the Cantonese have always kept it.

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 altar and the tablet are measured with a rule of their own. The carpenter’s tape sold in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the south prints two scales: the Lu Ban scale, which the front door page gives, for the living and their doors and furniture, and beneath it the Ding Lan scale, named for a filial son of the Han who carved his dead parents in wood and served them as if alive, for the things of the gods and the dead. It is 38.8 centimetres in ten segments, six auspicious and four not, repeating along the tape, and a height is read by where its remainder falls. A practitioner measuring an altar shelf at a hundred and fifty finds it in loss and moves it to a hundred and fifty-two, in wealth; the offering table at eighty is in offspring, and a tablet is cut to thirty-six, in wealth, which is why the tablets in the shops are all the same height. The scale is not in the fifteenth-century Lu Ban jing that Ruitenbeek translated and is the later trade’s addition, and the site gives it as it gives the Lu Ban rule, so that a reader knows what the practitioner with the tape is doing and can decide whether the two centimetres are worth it. A shelf at a hundred and fifty is a good shelf.

Evidence · What the ritual does

The research has not tested whether the Kitchen God reports, and does not need to; it has tested what the ritual does for the household that performs it. Norton and Gino, in a series of experiments, found that performing a ritual after a loss, any ritual and even an invented one, reduced grief and restored a sense of control, and that the effect did not depend on believing the ritual worked. The morning incense, the meal on the death day, the sweeping of the grave at Qingming are, on that reading, a technology for living with the dead that the tradition arrived at by practice, and the altar is the piece of furniture it needed. A house that keeps a shelf of its dead and a day for them is doing what the experiments describe, whatever else it thinks it is doing.

Misconception · Feng shui is worship

The trade sells the two together and the paperbacks blur them, and a reader may conclude that a house needs an altar to have feng shui, or that feng shui is a religion. It is neither. The tradition read houses that had gods in them and gave the gods the best places, but the reading itself, the hills, the door, the bed, the compass, asks nothing of any god and was practised by Confucian officials who despised the Buddhist and Daoist deities on the shelf. A household of no religion can keep the whole of the site’s advice; a household of any religion can keep its own altar by the tradition’s rules for a wall, a height and a door. What the tradition insists on is only that whatever a house honours be given the place of honour, and that is a rule about rooms.

The altar, in order

The wall of honour. Opposite the door and facing it, on a solid wall that is not the bathroom’s or the kitchen’s, in the room the household gathers in.
The height. The shelf at a hundred and fifty, above the seated eye and below the standing; the table at eighty.
Gods left, ancestors right. The altar’s own left and right, facing out; a burner before each, red lamps either side.
Nothing overhead, nothing facing. No beam above, no lavatory or stove door in front, no bedroom, no stair.
The floor and the post. The earth lord inside the door at the floor, facing out; the heaven official outside on the post.
The door and the stove. The door gods on the leaves at New Year; the Kitchen God above the stove, renewed when he returns.
Without gods. The same wall, the same height, the same facing, for the photographs and the things from your life.