What is feng shui?

The name means wind and water. In the fourth century a text on the siting of graves explained why: the vital breath of the land, qi, scatters when it rides the wind and is held when it meets water. A good site, then, is one that is sheltered from the first and close to the second. From that sentence a discipline grew that has been used for two millennia to place tombs, cities, palaces, farmhouses and, eventually, beds. This page says what the discipline is, what a reading consists of, which of its parts are old and which are new, and what it is not; the rest of the site is the practice, room by room.

The name and the idea

Before it was called feng shui the practice was called kanyu, roughly “canopy and chariot,” meaning heaven and earth observed together. The observer looked at the shape of hills, the course of water, the direction of the prevailing wind and the path of the sun, and asked where a building could sit so that it was protected, lit, drained and approachable. The vocabulary was cosmological; the questions were practical. The word feng shui itself is first found in the Zangshu, the Book of Burial, and it is worth noticing that the first book of the tradition is about the dead: the siting of a grave, in the belief that a well-placed ancestor prospered the living, was the practice’s original business, and the houses of the living inherited its rules later. The yin house page tells that story; the rest of this one is about the inheritance.

The classical ideal site is easy to picture. A hill or a rise behind, to block the north wind. Lower ground in front, open to the south and the sun. Gentle ridges to left and right, holding the site like the arms of a chair. Water crossing the view, slowly, and leaving by a narrow gap. The tradition gave the four sides animal names, the black tortoise behind, the vermilion bird in front, the azure dragon and the white tiger to the sides, but the picture is a valley farm, and anyone who has stood in one knows why it was preferred: it is warm in winter, dry in the rains, watered in summer, and it can see who is coming up the valley.

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The drawing is the whole of the tradition’s method in one shape at three scales. The valley is the site the Zangshu describes. The plot is the same shape with a hedge for the hill and a lawn for the open ground. The room is the same shape again, with a wall for the hill, a floor for the open ground and a door for the water, and the bed or the seat where the grave or the house would be. Everything the site says about a room is a version of this drawing, and a reader who holds it in mind can reconstruct most of the rules without the manuals.

What a reading is

A feng shui reading, classical or modern, is a walk with a set of questions, and the questions come in an order. The geomancer of the old texts began outside, with the landform: what is behind the site, what is at its sides, what is in front, where does the water come from and where does it go. Then the approach: how the road or the path arrives, what it points at, where it stops. Then the gate or the door: what it faces, what is seen first from it, where the line from it runs. Then the rooms, in the order of their importance to the household, which in a classical house meant the ancestral hall and the master’s bed and in a modern one means the bed, the desk and the main seat: for each, what is behind it, what it sees, what is in its line. And only then, if the reader is a compass practitioner, the compass: the facing taken at the door, the sectors laid over the plan, the tables consulted. The order is the tradition’s own and it is the site’s: landform, approach, door, rooms, compass, and never the compass instead of the rest.

Drag sideways to see the whole drawing

1. 1The landform: what is behind the site, at its sides, in front; where the water comes from and goes
2. 2The approach: how the road arrives, what it points at, where it stops
3. 3The door: what it faces, what is seen first from it, where its line runs
4. 4The rooms, in order of weight: the bed, the desk, the main seat; behind each, before each, in line with each
5. 5The compass, last: the facing taken at the door, the sectors laid on the plan, the tables opened

The drawing puts the five stations on one site, and the route between them is most of a practitioner’s day. Station one is on the hill or the road with the site in view, and it is where the classical texts spend most of their pages; station two is the approach, walked as a visitor walks it; station three is the door, stood in and looked out of both ways; station four is inside, at the bed, the desk and the seat in turn; and station five is the door again, with the instrument open. The site’s pages are arranged in the same order, the outside and the four animals before the entrance, the entrance before the bedroom, and the luopan and the flying stars at the end, which is where a reader who has walked the first four stations will find they need them least.

Three layers

It helps to think of feng shui as three layers laid down at different times, still all present.

The first is form: reading landform and, indoors, the shape and relationships of a room by eye. The command position of a bed, solid wall behind, door in view, out of its direct line, is a Form School idea and probably the oldest thing on this site. Its vocabulary is the four animals, the bright hall, the dragon veins and the water mouth, and its texts are the Zangshu and the Tang treatises on reading mountains.

The second is the compass. From the Song dynasty onward, practitioners used a magnetised needle, which Shen Kuo described in 1088 in what Needham took to be the earliest clear account of the instrument anywhere, and then an elaborate dial, the luopan, to fix orientation precisely and to attach to each direction a set of correspondences: a trigram, an element, a season, a member of the family, later a number and a star. Several distinct calculative methods grew from this and they do not all agree with one another; the schools page draws them as a tree.

The third layer is modern. When feng shui reached the West, first through the missionary Eitel’s book of 1873, which called it a would-be science, and then in the 1970s and 1980s through emigrant practitioners and the books written about them, it was simplified and, in one influential school, re-founded: the bagua was aligned to the front door instead of the compass, and its nine sectors became nine “life areas,” wealth in the far-left corner, relationships in the far right. This is the feng shui of most books and most websites. It is a real tradition with a real founder, Thomas Lin Yun, whose teaching Rossbach carried into print in 1983, and it is not classical. The site labels its claims accordingly.

The three layers are easiest to see on one room. Drawn three times, the same living room gives three readings that mostly agree and occasionally do not:

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Where it went

The practice was Chinese, and it travelled with Chinese writing to Korea, where it sited Seoul and became pungsu; to Japan, where it laid out Kyoto and narrowed to the reading of houses and directions; and to Vietnam, where the last dynasty built its citadel to the Form School’s plan. In the twentieth century it went with emigrants to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, where most of the modern manuals were written while the practice was suppressed on the mainland, and from there, in English, to the West. Yoon’s study of the Korean practice is the best account of what the tradition looks like outside China; the beyond China page draws the spread and the four capitals.

What it is not

It is not a science, and the classical writers did not think it was one in the modern sense. Qi is not a measurable quantity and no experiment has found it. Directions do not act on careers. A mirror does not damage a marriage. Where this site says that a piece of feng shui advice is supported by evidence, it means that research exists on the physical thing the advice touches, light, noise, temperature, sightlines, damp, air, and that the research points the same way. That happens more often than a sceptic might expect, because a great deal of feng shui is old good sense about shelter and light in cosmological dress, and old good sense about shelter and light is what the sleep laboratories and the housing surveys have spent fifty years confirming.

It is also not interior decoration, and it is not a shop. Nothing here will tell you to buy a fountain, a crystal or a three-legged toad; the classical list of objects is short and every item on it does a job a plan can see. The tradition is about relationships, door to bed, window to desk, wall to back, and the relationships are free.

How to read this site, and the room you are in

Start with the room you are in. Find north with a phone compass, and notice five things. Where the door is, and what you see first from it. Where the light comes from, and at what time of day. Which wall is solid, and which is glass. Where you would sit if you wanted to see who came in. And what, if anything, points at that seat: a corner, a beam, a corridor. That is most of the method, and it took a minute. The essays on the bagua and the Five Elements explain the vocabulary the tradition uses for what you have just noticed; the command position page gives the rule the seat obeys; the rooms and guides apply it, one room at a time; and the methodology page explains how the site labels what it says, so that a reader always knows whether a sentence is the tradition’s, a school’s, ours, or the research’s.