Methodology
How we write about feng shui.
Feng shui is at once a two-thousand-year-old cosmology, a set of competing modern schools, a body of practical observation about buildings, and a subject on which a small amount of real research bears. Writing about it honestly means keeping those four things apart on the page.
What this site is
FengShui.info is a reference, not a practice. We do not offer consultations, calculate personal numbers, sell objects, or promise outcomes. Nothing here is medical, financial or legal advice, and the pages that come nearest to needing it — the cot, the fire route, the flat being bought — name the guidance and the research they are drawn from, so that a reader can go to the source and to someone who answers for it. We describe what the tradition says, which school says it, what designers observe when they look at the same room, and what, if anything, has been tested.
We take the subject seriously as a cultural system with a long and documented history, and we take the reader seriously as someone who can hold the difference between “the tradition says” and “this is known.” The tone we aim for is that of a good architecture magazine writing about a historical building method: interested, precise, unembarrassed, and not credulous.
Where the tradition and the evidence point the same way, which happens more often than a sceptic might expect, we say so. Where they diverge, we say that too. And where a claim is metaphysical, about qi, fortune, or the effects of a direction on a life, we present it as the tradition’s claim and do not dress it as science.
Six kinds of claim
Every article labels its notes with one of six symbols. They appear in the article margin and inline, and mean the same thing everywhere on the site.
- Tradition What the classical texts and long practice say. “Classical siting placed the back of a house to the north.”
- School A claim specific to one lineage or method, named. “In the Western bagua, the north sector is career and life path.”
- Interpretation A modern reading, ours or others’, offered as such. “The command position is plausibly a rule about prospect and refuge.”
- Design observation What designers see in rooms, independent of feng shui. “A window beside the desk lights it without glare on the screen.”
- Evidence Where research exists, with what it actually shows and its limits. “Evening light delays melatonin onset; the effect is measurable.”
- Misconception A popular belief that neither the classical texts nor the named schools support. “The wealth corner is not ancient; it is a 1980s label on an old trigram.”
In practice a note looks like this:
The schools
“Feng shui” names several things that disagree with one another. When an article says “the tradition,” it means what the schools broadly share. When it says something only one school holds, it names the school.
Form School
The oldest layer, concerned with landform, water, shelter and approach: the “armchair” configuration of a protected site with open ground before it. It works by eye, without a compass, and most of what translates well into interior advice (the command position, the clear entrance, the solid wall behind the bed) descends from it.
Compass School
The family of calculative methods that use the luopan: Eight Mansions, which derives favourable directions from birth year; Flying Stars, which plots numbers onto a plan according to facing direction and construction period; and others. These are precise, internally consistent, and entirely dependent on premises the reader may or may not accept. We describe them; we do not compute them.
BTB, or Black Sect
A modern school established in the United States in the 1980s by Thomas Lin Yun. Its distinctive move was to align the bagua with the front door rather than with the compass and to assign nine “life areas” to the grid. It is the source of most popular Western feng shui and of the life-area labels you will see on this site, which we mark as such.
Contemporary interpretation
Designers, architects and writers who use feng shui as a vocabulary for spatial relationships without committing to its cosmology. Much of our own interpretation belongs here, and is labelled as interpretation.
What the evidence covers
There is no research showing that qi exists, that a direction affects a career, or that a mirror opposite a bed harms a marriage. There is a reasonable body of research on some of the things feng shui advice touches: light and sleep; noise and sleep; temperature and sleep; daylight and wellbeing at work; the psychology of seating with a wall behind and a view in front; and the relationship between a cluttered home and stress. We cite that research where it is relevant, describe what it shows, and note its limits: sample sizes, populations, and the difference between a correlation and a cause.
We do not cite studies we have not been able to read, and we do not round “some evidence” up to “proven.”
Sources we lean on
- Guo Pu (attrib.), Zangshu (Book of Burial), 4th centuryThe earliest definition of feng shui and the origin of the name.
- Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2 (1956)The classic Western account of geomancy within Chinese thought.
- Stephan Feuchtwang, An Anthropological Analysis of Chinese Geomancy (1974)How the system is structured and how practitioners use it.
- Ole Bruun, An Introduction to Feng Shui (Cambridge, 2008)A clear, critical survey of history, schools and the modern revival.
- Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (1975)The prospect–refuge hypothesis referred to in the guides.
- Chang, Aeschbach, Duffy & Czeisler, PNAS (2015)Evening use of light-emitting devices delays sleep and melatonin.
- Saxbe & Repetti, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2010)Home descriptions, clutter and daily cortisol patterns.
- World Health Organization, Night Noise Guidelines for Europe (2009)The 40 dB night-time guideline cited in the sleep guide.
- Boubekri et al., Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (2014)Windows and daylight exposure in workplaces and sleep quality.
Images and drawings
Photographs are licensed from Unsplash and credited in every caption. They are chosen for what they show about light, orientation and proportion, not as illustrations of “feng shui interiors.” Plans and diagrams are drawn by us in a single notation, and are schematic: they show relationships, not measurements.
Every plan is drawn north up, with the front door where the compass puts it and the same marks throughout: walls, doors with their swing, windows as gaps in the wall, furniture as soft shapes with a line where the head or the back goes, the arrangement the tradition avoids drawn as a ghost, one sight line to the door, and the recommended point in red, the only colour the drawings use. The key below names each mark once.