Learn · Houses · 14 min read · Updated September 2026

The houses the manuals were written for

The yang-house texts assume a house, and it is not the reader’s. The Beijing courtyard house room by room, the gate in the south-east, the screen, the hall facing south and the wings by generation; the sky-well house of the south with its four waters returning to the hall; the earth buildings of Fujian and the sunken courts of the loess; what each form built of the tradition’s sentence; and what the modern flat kept of the plan and what it lost.

Oriented NE 033°

Earth

Fig. 01 Whitewashed walls and dark tiled roofs, stepped against fire. The houses of the south kept the tradition in their section as the north kept it in the plan.

When a yang-house manual says “the house”, it means a particular building, and the reader who does not know which one misreads half its rules. The manuals of the Ming and Qing assume the courtyard house of the north, walled, gated in the south-east, with its hall along the north facing south and its household sorted into wings; their rules about gates, screens, halls and stoves are rules about that plan. The rest of China built the same sentence in other shapes, the tall sky-well houses of the south, the ringed earth buildings of Fujian, the courts dug into the loess, and each kept the tradition in a different part of the building. This essay gives the courtyard house room by room, the three regional forms and what each made of the rules, and what the modern flat, which is where the reader lives, kept of the plan and lost.

The courtyard house, room by room

The Beijing courtyard house, siheyuan, the enclosure on four sides, is a walled rectangle with its long axis north and south and its buildings on the four sides of one or more courts, and everything the manuals say about a house can be walked through it. The gate is in the south-east corner, in the sector the Later Heaven bagua gives to Xun, the wind, which the bagua essay explains and which the manuals call the gate of the wind for the good qi it lets in; it is never on the axis, and a household entering turns at once, because a spirit screen, yingbi, stands inside it and takes the line. Beyond the screen is the front court with the south row of rooms along the street wall, facing north and given to the servants, the kitchen and the study, the rooms the household could spare the sun. On the axis stands the inner gate, the hanging-flower gate, chuihua men, which divides the outer household from the inner and which a guest did not pass unasked. Beyond it is the main court, and on its three sides the family: the principal hall, zheng fang, along the north, facing south, raised on its platform, with the ancestral altar on its back wall and the elders’ rooms either side, which the household gods and furniture essays furnish; and the wings, xiang fang, east and west, the east for the eldest son’s family and the west for the second, the house for old age guide having drawn the generations in place. A rich house repeats the main court once or twice more to the north, and a garden lies beyond the last hall. The plan is the tradition’s sentence built: the wall behind, the open court in front of the hall as its bright hall, the gate at the corner, water, if there is any, in the court. When the manuals forbid a gate on the axis, a hall facing north or a kitchen in the north-west, they are describing this house’s mistakes, and the reader in a flat should know which of their rules are the plan’s and which are the room’s.

Tradition · The gate of the wind

The south-east gate is the courtyard house’s one rule that a reader can watch the manuals argue for. The Later Heaven bagua puts Xun, the wind, in the south-east; the Eight Mansions school makes the south-east the best direction of the house that sits north and faces south, its sheng qi; and the summer wind of the north China plain comes from the south-east, so that a gate there catches it and a screen inside stops it running through. Three reasons, cosmological, schematic and climatic, for one corner, and Knapp finds the gate there in nine courtyard houses out of ten from the Yuan to the Republic. A rule with three reasons is the tradition at its most convincing, and a reader who wants to know how much of feng shui is climate can start at this gate.

The south, the ring and the pit

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.

The drawing above sets the courtyard house beside three of the forms the rest of the country built, and each keeps the tradition somewhere else. The sky-well house of Huizhou and the lower Yangtze, the house of the salt and tea merchants of the Ming and Qing, is the courtyard squeezed by land and heat: tall, narrow, two storeys deep between whitewashed walls, with a small open court at its centre, the sky-well, tianjing, that gives the house its light, its air and its water, and the hall open to the court behind it. The tradition is in the section rather than the plan, and the next drawing gives it. The earth building of Fujian, tulou, the ring house of the Hakka and Minnan lineages, is the courtyard bent into a circle and raised into a fort: three or four storeys of rammed earth with every room facing the inner court, the ancestral hall at the centre, and a single gate, sited by the Form School as a village is sited, with the hill behind the ring and the stream before its gate, and the whole lineage inside. The sunken court of the loess plateau, the dikengyuan of Henan and Shanxi, is the courtyard dug rather than built: a pit eight or nine metres deep in flat ground, 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, the principal rooms in the north wall face south into the sun, and the fields go on over the roof. Golany measured the caves at a steady temperature summer and winter that no built house of the region matches, which is the tradition’s back-to-the-hill as thermal mass. Four houses, one sentence: the hall facing south with the earth behind it, the water kept in front, the gate to the south or south-east, and the household arranged round a court by rank.

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.

Design observation · Four waters, and a house that drinks its rain

A designer reading the sky-well section sees a house that solves three problems at once with one hole in the roof. The well lights and ventilates a deep plan on a lane too narrow for windows, which is the courtyard’s job done in a fifth of the ground; the roofs sloping inward turn the house into a rain catchment, and the basin at the bottom of the well was the household’s water in a region of long wet seasons; and the walls that rise above the roofs in steps, the horse-head walls, stop a fire crossing from one house to the next, which is why a Huizhou lane is a row of them. The tradition read the same section as four waters returning to the hall, wealth kept: it gave the merchant a cosmological reason to build the house the climate wanted, and he built it, and the two readings do not compete.

What the flat kept

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 reader lives in none of these, and the question the essay exists for is what the plan the manuals assume has to do with a flat on the ninth floor. More than it seems, and less than the paperbacks say. What the flat kept is the sequence: a door, a place inside it to turn, the living room as the hall with the household’s seats and its pictures on the far wall, the bedrooms behind it by rank, the kitchen at the side, and the window as the court, the flat’s one source of light, air and view. The entrance page is the front court, the living room the hall, the small apartments guide the sky-well house’s problem of depth, and the rules the site gives for each are the courtyard’s rules scaled. What the flat lost is the court itself, the open ground in front of the hall that every one of the four houses has, and with it the tradition’s bright hall, its water and its sky; a balcony is what remains, which is why the room guides make so much of one. And what the flat never had is the gate in the south-east, the wings by generation and the ancestral hall, the parts of the plan that were the household’s structure rather than the house’s, and the parts the manuals’ rules most often concern. A reader who finds a rule in a manual should ask which room of the courtyard house it was written for, and the misconceptions essay gives the ones that did not survive the move.

Evidence · What the courtyard did for the people in it

The research on the courtyard house is mostly climatic and mostly favourable: the court as a light well and a ventilation stack, the walls as thermal mass, the sunken court of the loess at a steady twelve to fifteen degrees through a winter of minus ten and a summer of thirty-five, which Golany measured. What the research does not support is the household order the plan enforced, the generations in their wings and the women in the inner court, which Evans’s review of housing and health would file under crowding and the lack of control over one’s own room. The tradition’s house was a good building and a hard household, and the site keeps the building’s lessons, light, air, a court, a hall with its back protected, and leaves the household’s to the reader.

Reading a house by its plan, in order

Find the hall. The room the household gathers in, with its back to the solid side of the house and its face to the light; in the courtyard it faced south, in a flat it faces the window.
Find the court. The open ground in front of the hall, the tradition’s bright hall; the court, the sky-well, the ring’s centre, the pit; in a flat, the window and the balcony.
Find the gate. Where the house is entered and how the line is turned inside it; the south-east corner and the screen, or a door and a place to pause.
Sort the rooms by rank. The elders and the sleepers deepest in, the kitchen and the servants nearest the street; the bedroom at the far end of the flat.
Find the water. Where the rain goes and where the water stands; the sky-well keeps it, the courtyard collects it, the flat has a bathroom and a rule about its door.
Ask which house the rule was for. Every rule in a manual has a room of the courtyard house behind it; find the room before you apply the rule.