Learn · Reference · 13 min read · Updated September 2026

The remedies

The tradition’s catalogue of cures is short, and it is made of building. What the manuals could change and what they told a household to leave; the six classical remedies, the spirit screen, the stone that dares, the bagua mirror, the pagoda at the water mouth, the half-moon pond and the door gods; the villages of the south that raised towers for their sons’ examinations; the lawsuits a neighbour’s roof could start; and how the shop’s catalogue of crystals and toads replaced a catalogue of walls.

Oriented SW 225°

Earth

Fig. 01 A pagoda on a wooded island in still water. The tradition’s largest remedy was a tower built where the water left the view.

The sha essay gives the tradition’s catalogue of faults, and this one gives its catalogue of cures, which is shorter and heavier. The manuals did not sell objects; they moved doors, dug ponds, raised walls and, when a whole valley was wrong, built a tower. The remedies they prescribed were the work of masons and of lineages, they stood for centuries, and most of the classical landscape of southern China that a traveller admires, the screen inside a gate, the pond before a hall, the pagoda on the point where the river leaves a town, is a remedy. This essay gives what the manuals thought could be changed, the six remedies as they were built, the village that built them, and how a catalogue of walls became a catalogue of trinkets.

What could be mended

The Book of Burial opens the question by closing it: a site whose forms are wrong is to be abandoned, and the sentence, which the yin house essay follows through the grave literature, is the first rule of remedy in the yang-house manuals too. A house with a mountain behind it and water before it needed nothing; a house with the mountain in front and the water behind could not be helped; and the remedies were for the sites between, which is most of them. The manuals then rank what can be done, and the order is the order of cost. A person can be moved, a bed turned from a door or a desk from a window, which is the command position and costs nothing. An opening can be moved, a door shifted a bay along a wall or a window closed and another opened, which is a mason’s week and the remedy the manuals most often name. A line can be interrupted, by a wall, a screen, a hedge, a pond, which is the spirit screen and its family. And a landscape can be corrected, by planting the gap in a ridge, damming a stream, closing a water mouth with a tower, which is a district’s work and a generation’s money. De Groot, describing the masters of Fujian in the 1880s, lists what they prescribed and it is this list: doors moved, screens raised, ponds dug, pagodas built, and, for the households that could afford none of it, a mirror. Feuchtwang’s analysis of a practitioner’s reading a century later finds the same order, with the same last resort. What the manuals never prescribe is an object in a room. The remedy for a fault inside was to move something, and for a fault outside to build something, and the catalogue that follows is the catalogue of what was built.

Fig. 01 Why there are remedies at all. The Book of Burial opens the question by closing it: a site whose forms are right needs nothing done to it, and a site whose forms are reversed — the mountain in front of the house and the water behind it — cannot be helped and is to be abandoned. Neither of those is where a household usually finds itself. The third case is the ordinary one: level ground with nothing much behind and a road rather than a river in front, and it is for this that the manuals keep their catalogue. The remedies drawn in it are dashed because they have not been made yet: a grove planted where the tortoise should be, a pond dug where the water should be. Drawn in section, looking along the house's axis, because the argument is about what stands behind a house and what lies in front of it. The order the manuals then use is the order of cost, from moving a person, which is free, to raising a pagoda at a valley's water mouth, which is a district's work and a generation's money; the catalogue that follows in the essay is the catalogue of what was built, and the remedies never include an object in a room.

Tradition · The pagoda of letters

The largest remedy the tradition made was for the largest fault, a valley whose water left it too openly, and the answer was a tower. From the Ming onward, the counties and lineages of Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi raised pagodas at the water mouth of their valleys, on the point or the hill where the river passed out of view, to close the gap and hold the qi of the district, and dedicated them to Wenchang, the god of literature, because the qi they held was the qi of the examinations: a county with a pagoda at its mouth expected graduates. They were called wenfeng ta, pagodas of the literary peak, and there are hundreds; Freedman found the lineages of the south funding them as they funded ancestral halls, and quarrelling over their siting, and Eitel in 1873 records the districts that raised subscriptions for a tower after a run of failed candidates. A pagoda of letters is not a Buddhist building, though it took the Buddhist form; it is a feng shui remedy at the scale of a county, and the most expensive thing the tradition ever asked for.

The catalogue

Fig. 02 The classical catalogue of remedies, which is short and is made of building, not of objects. The spirit screen, a wall set inside the gate, is the oldest and the model for all the rest: it takes a line that would run straight into the court and turns it, and every screen, plant and curtain the room guides place across a door’s line is a small one. The stone that dares, a slab cut with the words Taishan shi gan dang, is set at the point where a road or a lane ends at a house and takes the rush in the house’s place, and is the one remedy that is an inscription. The bagua mirror over a lintel faces outward at a road, a corner or a ridge, and is an exterior object in the tradition, never an indoor one. The pagoda is the remedy of a district: built at the water mouth of a valley, where the stream leaves the view, to close the gap and hold the qi of the whole settlement, and the villages of Guangdong and Fujian raised hundreds in the Ming and Qing for the examination luck of their sons. The half-moon pond before an ancestral hall gives the hall its bright hall of water, and is dug, not bought. The door gods and the couplets on the leaves guard the threshold, and are renewed every New Year. Six remedies, and five of them are walls, stones, towers, ponds and paper; the tradition corrected a site by building on it. The stone that dares takes its words from Mount Tai, the eastern peak, and Knapp records them on lanes across the south; de Groot in 1897 described the pagodas and the screens as the remedies the Fujian masters prescribed, and the mirror as the one the households bought. The wind chime, the crystal and the three-legged toad are not in the catalogue.

The six classical remedies are on the drawing, and each is the answer to a named fault. The spirit screen, yingbi, the free-standing wall inside the gate of every courtyard house from the palace to the farm, answers the through-house: it takes the line that would run from the gate into the court and turns it, gives the visitor a pause and the household a face, and is the model of every screen, plant and curtain the room guides set across a door’s line. The stone that dares, shi gan dang, a slab cut with the five words Taishan shi gan dang, “the stone of Mount Tai dares to resist”, answers the road-rush: it is set at the point where a lane or a road ends at a house, at a bridgehead or a bend, and takes the rush in the house’s place, and Knapp records it on the lanes of every southern province, sometimes as a whole stone lion, sometimes as five characters on a brick. The bagua mirror, bagua jing, a small mirror in an octagon of trigrams, answers the corner and the ridge: it is hung over the lintel facing outward at the thing that points, to send its line back, and in the older practice it is an exterior object only, which the mirrors guide draws in detail and the shops have forgotten. The pagoda answers the open water mouth, as the note above gives. The half-moon pond, banyue chi, dug before an ancestral hall or a large house, answers the site without water in front: it gives the hall its bright hall of water, the ming tang that the Form school wants before every important building, and it was also the village’s fire pond and its fishpond, which the tradition did not mind. The door gods and the couplets, which the household gods essay gives their history, answer the threshold’s openness at the turn of the year, and are paper, renewed. Six remedies: one wall, one stone, one mirror, one tower, one pond and one sheet of paper, and only the mirror is bought.

Design observation · A remedy is a detail that would be there anyway

A designer reading the catalogue notices that five of the six are ordinary architecture with the reason written on them. The spirit screen is a vestibule with the door taken away, which is what an entrance transition is; the pond is water in front of the principal façade, which every formal garden from Isfahan to Versailles put there; the stone at the road’s end is a bollard, which the highway engineer puts at the same place for the same reason; the grove at the water mouth is a windbreak, which Heisler measured slowing the wind for ten times its height downwind; the tower on the point is the landmark every town builds where its river turns. The tradition’s remedies work because they are the things a settlement needs, named in its vocabulary; a designer can take the catalogue as a list of details and lose nothing but the names.

The village mended

Plan 03 A village with its remedies A settlement in the Form School’s position, the back hill to the north, the stream passing in front from east to west, and the five remedies the district would have built between the Ming and the Qing. The pagoda stands at the water mouth in the south-west, where the stream leaves the valley’s view, with a grove of trees planted to close the gap beside it; together they hold what the water would carry away, and the pagoda’s upper storey was the village’s literary shrine. The half-moon pond lies before the ancestral hall, dug so that the hall has water in its bright hall, and the hall’s gate has a spirit screen inside it. The lane from the east road ends at the village, and the stone that dares stands at its end. The one house whose door the western ridge points at wears a bagua mirror. Everything on the drawing except the mirror is earth, stone, water and trees, built once and kept for centuries; the district that built them was correcting its valley, not decorating it.

The drawing above puts the catalogue in a valley, and the valley is the tradition’s real client. A village in the south sat where the Form school put it, the back hill to the north, the stream passing in front, and read its remedies at the scale of the settlement: the water mouth in the south-west closed with a pagoda and a planted grove, so that the stream left the view without carrying the district’s qi with it; the half-moon pond before the ancestral hall, dug when the hall was built and kept as the fire pond; the screen inside the hall’s gate; the stone at the end of the lane from the road; a mirror on the one house the western ridge pointed at. Freedman’s lineages of Fujian and Guangdong built and maintained these as a lineage’s common property, and fought over them: the fights are the best evidence of how seriously the remedies were meant. A neighbour who raised a roof that blocked a lineage’s view of its facing hill, or cut a grove at a water mouth, or built on the dragon vein, could be sued, and de Groot and Eitel both record the lawsuits, the fights and the occasional riot, and Eitel records the Hong Kong government of the 1860s learning that a road cut through a ridge was a wound the villages would resist. The city essay follows the same logic to the walled town, and Schinz’s study of the Chinese city finds the pagoda at the river’s turn in the plans of hundreds of county seats: the town corrected its site as the village did, with the same catalogue at a larger scale. Bruun’s account of the twentieth century closes the story: the campaigns against superstition took the mirrors and the door gods first, because they were paper and glass, and left the pagodas, the ponds and the screens, because they were buildings; and when the practice revived in the 1980s the buildings were still there, and the villages that had kept their water mouths began again to say why.

Evidence · What can be tested, and what has been

No study has tested a stone or a mirror against a road, and none is likely to. What the catalogue contains that can be measured is the grove and the pond: a windbreak of trees slows the wind behind it for a distance of ten to fifteen times its height, which Heisler’s review of shelterbelt research gives with numbers, and a body of water before a building cools and steadies the air over it, which the water features guide cites. The spirit screen is a vestibule, and the entrance page gives what a transition at the door does to the people who cross it. The mirror’s claim is optical and the mirrors guide draws what a mirror does to a line, which is nothing the line minds. The honest account is that the remedies of earth, water and trees do what the tradition said in a way it did not mean, and the remedies of glass and paper do what any sign does, which is to tell the household the fault has been seen.

Misconception · A cure is something you buy

The shops sell a catalogue of cures the tradition does not contain: the crystal in the window, the three-legged toad by the door, the wind chime in the hall, the fountain in the wealth corner, the red string, the coins under the mat. Most of it is the Black Sect’s, assembled in California in the 1980s from the school’s own symbolism, which the schools essay describes and the site labels; the rest is the trade’s. The classical catalogue is the six above, and five of them are built. A household that wants the tradition’s remedy for a fault should expect to move a bed, shift a door, raise a screen or plant a hedge, and to buy nothing; and a practitioner who prescribes an object for an interior fault is prescribing from a catalogue the manuals did not write.

Remedies, in the manuals’ order

Move the person. The bed from the door, the desk from the window, the chair to the wall; the remedy that costs nothing and answers most interior faults.
Move the opening. A door shifted a bay, a window closed and another opened; the mason’s remedy and the one the manuals most often name.
Interrupt the line. The spirit screen and its family: a wall, a screen, a hedge, a curtain across the through-house or the road-rush.
Set the stone or the mirror outside. The stone that dares at the road’s end; the bagua mirror over the lintel facing the corner. Both outside; neither in a room.
Dig and plant. The pond before the hall for a site without water; the grove at the gap for a ridge that is open; the trees by direction.
Build the tower. The pagoda at the water mouth, for a valley and by a district; the remedy of last resort and largest scale.
Or leave. The Book of Burial’s first advice, for the site none of the above can mend; the choosing a home guide says when.