N 000°

https://fengshui.info/paths/

Reading paths · 9 sequences

Read it in order.

The site is a reference and can be entered anywhere. These paths are for readers who would rather be led: each is a sequence of articles, with the time it takes, ending where the question it began with is answered as far as it can be.

Path 01 · 13 articles · 177 min

Start here

The system in six pieces, from the pair at its base to the list of things it never said.

  1. 01 Questions people ask Does it work, which way should the bed face, is my house bad, do I need a consultant, where is the wealth corner, can I do it in a rented flat, do the cures work, how do I find my facing direction, does the building’s age matter, is the balcony part of it, can it help me sell, are the air and the noise feng shui, which house were the rules written for, is it a religion, and where to start. Short answers, with the page that gives the long one. 14 min
  2. 02 What is feng shui? A two-thousand-year-old discipline for placing buildings and people in relation to land, light and direction, and a modern vocabulary for reading rooms. Both are real; they are not the same thing. Where the name comes from, what a reading actually consists of, the three layers the practice is made of, what it is not, and how to begin with the room you are sitting in. 15 min
  3. 03 Yin and yang in a room The oldest pair in Chinese thought, brought down to the scale of a house. The hill the words were named on, the texts that made them a cosmology and the late date of the diagram everyone knows, the gradient of a house and of a day, the end of a room that works and the end that rests, and what the sleep research says about each. 11 min
  4. 04 Understanding the Bagua Eight figures of three lines each, arranged in a ring and in a square. Where the trigrams come from and what the Book of Changes hangs on them, the two arrangements and who drew them, what Leibniz saw in the older one, the grid the tradition lays over a floor plan, and the two ways of laying it that give different answers. 14 min
  5. 05 The Five Elements Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water. Not substances but phases, each producing the next and restraining the one beyond. Where the system came from and how old it is, the two cycles the tradition uses and the two it leaves to medicine, the vocabulary it gives shape, colour, material and direction, the hills it was first read in, how a room is diagnosed before anything is added, and what the colour research does and does not support. 11 min
  6. 06 The four animals The dragon, the bird, the tiger and the tortoise are the oldest thing in feng shui and the most misread. Where the four came from, in the Han sky and a Neolithic grave; how the Book of Burial brought them down to the hills round a site, and what shape it wanted each to take; the site seen from the side; what the practitioners made of them indoors, and which left is the dragon’s; and what the research on prospect and refuge says about the armchair they describe. 15 min
  7. 07 The command position The oldest rule in domestic feng shui and the one every school shares. Solid behind, the door in view, out of its line. Where it comes from in the Book of Burial, what a seated person can actually see, how it places the bed, the desk, the main seat and the stove, what the research on seating says, and the order in which to give it up. 14 min
  8. 08 Twelve things feng shui does not say The claims most often attached to the tradition, where each of them comes from, and what the tradition says instead. For readers who have been told something with great confidence. 14 min
  9. 09 Hiring a practitioner What a classical consultation is and what it is not. Who the master was and how the villages paid them; the visit in the order it is done, the brief, the street, the compass on the threshold, the rooms and the written report; what a good report contains; the fees and the red packet; the six signs of a reading and the six of a sale; and what the evidence says a consultation can and cannot change. 14 min
  10. 10 Drawing your plan Every reading on this site begins with a plan, and most readers have never drawn one. How to measure a flat and draw it at one to fifty in an afternoon; how to take north at the door and put it on the paper; how to find the centre of a plan that is not a rectangle, three ways, and why the paperbacks’ way is wrong by a metre; how to divide the plan into its eight sectors; what to draw in ink and what in pencil; and the errors that make a reading wrong before it starts. 15 min
  11. 11 Feng shui in a day The order of work. Eight stations on one flat, from the front door inward, in the order the tradition reads a house and the order each decision constrains the next. What can be done between breakfast and dinner with a tape measure and a plan, the one page to write at the end of it, and what should not be attempted in a day at all. 14 min
  12. 12 A flat, read from start to finish Every essay on the site describes a piece of a reading; this guide does one whole. A corner flat on the seventh floor, two occupants born in 1979 and 1984, a balcony facing east at eighty-eight degrees, a block finished in 2025. The brief, the street, the door, the rooms, the compass, the kua of both, the Period 9 chart and what it says, the findings in order of weight, the remedies in order of cost, and the page the household is handed at the end. 12 min
  13. 13 A house, read from start to finish The second worked reading, and the one the flat could not give, a two-storey house of ten by eight metres with a garden front and back, a family of four born in 1978, 1981, 2012 and 2015, a front door facing south-east at a hundred and thirty-four degrees, built in 2024. The street and the ground behind, the door, the stair and the rooms on both floors, the compass, the four kua, the Period 9 chart with its double star at the sitting and what the school asks for it, the garden, the findings in order of weight and the page at the end. 14 min

Path 02 · 11 articles · 140 min

Sleep

The bedroom, the bed, the mirror and the light: the part of the tradition with the most evidence behind it.

  1. 01 Bedroom feng shui The room the tradition cares about most, because it is where the body is unguarded for a third of its life. The yin end of the house, the bed the tradition slept in and what it taught, the command position, what may not hang over a sleeper or lie under one, the light and the dark with the numbers the sleep research gives, and what to do about the mirror. 11 min
  2. 02 Bed placement Three conditions, one plan. Where the bed goes is the oldest question in domestic feng shui and the one with the clearest answer, a wall behind the head, the door in view, the body out of the door’s line. Why each condition is there, what to give up first when a room cannot give all three, the four rooms that are not the drawing, the walls that are quiet and the walls that are not, and what the sleep research adds. 11 min
  3. 03 A bed for two The bed placement rules, applied to a couple. Both sides open, both pillows seeing the door, the room widths that allow it and the bed sizes that do not, who takes the door side, the dragon and tiger sides the folk tradition assigns, the compass problem the schools never solved, and what the research on couples’ sleep says about all of it. 11 min
  4. 04 The mirror facing the bed The tradition’s most repeated warning, and the one that survives translation best. What a mirror does to a bedroom, in plan and in section; where the rule comes from and what the folk reasons were; what a designer sees, what the sleep research can and cannot say; the television that is a mirror after dark; and what to do, in order of effort. 12 min
  5. 05 Feng shui for better sleep Where a two-thousand-year-old tradition and forty years of sleep research say the same thing about a room, and where they don’t. The night as the body keeps it, ten arrangements with what the tradition says and what the laboratory has measured, and the order to do them in. 12 min
  6. 06 Quiet The tradition’s still room, measured. What the manuals mean by stillness and what they keep out of a bedroom, the bells the temples hung and the chimes the shops sell, the house in decibels with the guidelines on it, a flat planned against its noise, and what the research on noise found in the children who lived under a flight path. 13 min
  7. 07 The baby’s room The tradition’s first year and the paediatricians’ agree on the room and disagree on almost nothing else. The fetus spirit that stops a household drilling while a woman is expecting; the confinement month, its closed warm room and what the research makes of it; the bed mother and the cot she guards; where the cot goes, by the safe-sleep guidance and the command position; the first year’s rites, from the third-day bath to the choosing test; and the room a child grows out of. 14 min
  8. 08 The house for old age The tradition gave its elders the best room in the house and the research says why that was right. The principal hall of the courtyard house and who slept either side of it; what a room for later life asks that a younger room does not, the light doubled, the bed a hand higher, the stair with two rails, the threshold that is no threshold; the falls that the home causes and the modifications that prevent them; and what a designer adds to a tradition that kept its elders warm and near the sun. 15 min
  9. 09 Lighting The tradition has more to say about light than about anything else in a room, because light is what yin and yang look like indoors. Where the lamps go and at what height, what colour the light should be and when, the window as the first lamp, the three layers a designer works in, the numbers the research gives for the evening, and a room-by-room list. 13 min
  10. 10 Windows The tradition calls windows the eyes of the house and has fewer rules for them than the decorating press suggests, and better ones. The line from the door to the window, the seat under a window and the bed beneath one, the height of a sill, what a window looks at and the Ming gardener’s art of borrowing a view, light on two sides, and the case for opening it every morning. 15 min
  11. 11 The air in the house Qi was breath before it was anything else, and the tradition’s word for a closed room was dead. What the manuals meant by living and dead qi; where the air stops in a flat, the room with one window and the bathroom with none; the two numbers a monitor gives, carbon dioxide and fine particles, and where the research sets the lines; the stove, the candle and the incense as the house’s own smoke; the plants that do not clean the air; and the morning window the tradition opened before it did anything else. 13 min

Path 03 · 20 articles · 266 min

A new home

From the street to the last box: what to read at a viewing, and what to do in the first week.

  1. 01 Choosing a home: reading the site What to look at from the street, at the door and on the plan when viewing a house or a flat, in the order the tradition looks. The five steps of a classical site reading, the plot shapes the manuals rank, the surveyor’s list beside the tradition’s, and which of its objections can be fixed after moving in. 12 min
  2. 02 Choosing a flat The tradition was written for houses on the ground and most of its readers now live in the air. What the classical reading makes of a tower, in the order a buyer meets it. The building’s site and shape, and whose facing a flat has; which floor, with the street, the trees and the wind banded in section; the floor plate read from the corridor, the lifts, the door opposite and the refuse room; the unit’s own shape and door; and what the research on high-rise living says about height, children and the view. 14 min
  3. 03 Building and renovating The one time the tradition’s rules for a site, a plan and a door can still be followed rather than worked around. The order of decisions from the ground to the paint, what the tradition asks at each and what it costs to undo, the rites the builders kept, the days the almanac gives, and what a renovation can and cannot reach. 13 min
  4. 04 Moving house The tradition moved house as a rite and the research describes it as a stressor, and both are right. The almanac’s day for entering a house, the stove and the rice pot that go in first, the bed settled on its own day and slept in that night, the door dressed, the meal with the door open; the old house left clean; the order in which to unpack a home so that the first night is a night; and what the studies of residential moves say about children and the first year. 13 min
  5. 05 The outside Garden, balcony, approach. The part of the site the tradition was written for, read at the scale of a plot rather than a valley. The four guardians as hedges, the approach as a sequence, the water in front and the mouth it leaves by, what the Ming garden manual says about suiting the site, the research on green ground, and what a balcony can do about all of it when there is no plot at all. 12 min
  6. 06 Planting by direction The tradition planted a house as it sited one, with the four animals in trees. What the manuals want along each side of a plot, the evergreens to the north, the tall dragon to the east, the low tiger to the west and the open south; the tree that must not stand in the gate; the sayings about the mulberry, the willow, the poplar and the peach, and which are puns; the Ming garden’s borrowed view; and what the energy research says a tree on the west wall does. 13 min
  7. 07 The garden The Chinese garden is feng shui made for pleasure. The manual the garden makers wrote in 1631 and what it says instead of a compass; the scholar’s garden read as a site, mountain behind and water in front, the approach turned and the view held; the six devices, suiting the ground, borrowing the view, the false mountain, the pond, the winding path and the leak window; what the garden owners actually grew; and what a balcony and a bowl of water can keep of it. 15 min
  8. 08 The entrance The mouth of qi, in the tradition’s phrase. The door through which everything comes in, the threshold the tradition raised and guarded, the first few steps inside it and what those steps should be furnished for, with the heights the joiners and the access codes give, and what the housing research says about a watched door. 12 min
  9. 09 Front door feng shui The mouth of qi, in the tradition’s phrase, and the one place where every school starts. The gate of the courtyard house and the screen behind it, what the door should open onto and what should not face it, the approach outside, the carpenter’s ruler that sized the opening, and what the research on thresholds says. 12 min
  10. 10 Doors inside the house The tradition read the front door as the mouth of the house and every door inside it as a smaller mouth, and most of what it says about them is about hinges. Which way a door should swing and why; the four faults of interior doors, the door that faces a door, the three in a line, the bedroom’s opposite the bathroom’s; how many doors a room can bear before it is a corridor; the sizes a door should have; what a closed door does to sound; and the one rule about the bathroom that is a smell and not a leak. 14 min
  11. 11 Sha, the catalogue of faults The tradition names its faults. A road at the door, a road that curves away, a corner aimed at a window, the slit between two towers; inside, a door in line with a window, a beam over a bed, a wall’s edge, a stair at the entrance. What the names are, where the word comes from, what they have in common, how far each reaches, what the manuals do about them, and what the research can say at each range. 13 min
  12. 12 The neighbours The house next door is the part of a site nobody chooses, and the tradition had more to say about it than the paperbacks repeat; what the manuals read in a door that faces yours, a corner that points, a roof that overtops and a wall you share; the mirror war, how it starts and how it ends; what the noise and crowding research measured through the party wall; and the rule the tradition put before every cure, which was to screen and never to point. 13 min
  13. 13 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. 13 min
  14. 14 The water dragon On the plains there were no hills, and the tradition read the rivers instead. The Water Dragon Classic and the delta it was written for; the six forms of water read from a door, the jade belt and the reverse bow, the water that shoots, the water that leaves, the meeting and the pool; the water mouth that closes a site; what the river engineer says about the inside and the outside of a bend, which is the classic’s rule with the mechanism attached; and how the forms scale down to a road, a drive and a bowl. 13 min
  15. 15 Finding your facing direction The compass methods depend on one measurement, and most readings go wrong before any chart is drawn. How to decide which way a house faces, how to take the bearing and how to check it against the sun, what the phone in your hand does to the needle, the two norths and the angle between them, the three rings of the luopan and which one to read, and what to do when the answer falls on a line. 15 min
  16. 16 Small apartments and studios One room that has to be a house. How the tradition divides a small space by use and by light, the screen it used to do it, where the bed goes when there is no bedroom, the clearances a studio needs between its things, what to do with the kitchen in the living room, and what the tradition’s own smallest flats, in Hong Kong, make of the rules. 13 min
  17. 17 Rented homes What the tradition can do in a home whose walls, windows and kitchen belong to someone else. The two lists the manuals keep, the one a tenant has entire; what cannot be changed and what answers it; the tenant’s toolkit with its sizes; the order to unpack on the first day; and the case for spending only on what leaves in the van. 13 min
  18. 18 The shared flat A flat of three adults who are not a family is the house the tradition never wrote for and the one it had a plan for anyway; the compound divided among households, which Beijing called the big mixed courtyard; how to read a shared flat as three houses and a hall, each room set as a house is set and the kitchen kept as the hall; the door of a room as a front door; what the crowding research says the plan is for; and the two rules that keep a house-share from becoming a corridor of strangers. 15 min
  19. 19 Clutter and order The tradition’s oldest domestic rule and the one with the most evidence behind it. Why the manuals want the floor open, what counts as clutter and what does not, the five places it lands, the heights at which things should live, the paper that arrives at the door, and what the research on cluttered homes actually found. 13 min
  20. 20 Selling a house The tradition read a house as a record of the people who had lived in it, and a buyer in Hong Kong or Vancouver still does. What a house with a history is and how the market prices it; the buyer’s first ten minutes and the six faults their practitioner sees; the numbers, floors and dates that move a price and by how much; the afternoon of fixes that costs a screen; the leaving as the manuals kept it; and what the staging research says a buyer actually feels. 15 min

Path 04 · 14 articles · 197 min

The compass

The instrument, the reading, and the three methods built on it, ending with what can and cannot be said for them.

  1. 01 The luopan and the twenty-four mountains The feng shui compass is a magnetic needle inside a stack of rings, and it is older than the mariner’s compass by a thousand years of texts. Where it came from, what the rings are and which one to read, why there are twenty-four sectors rather than eight, the three plates of the San He instrument and the two norths, and how a reading is taken and written down. 17 min
  2. 02 Finding your facing direction The compass methods depend on one measurement, and most readings go wrong before any chart is drawn. How to decide which way a house faces, how to take the bearing and how to check it against the sun, what the phone in your hand does to the needle, the two norths and the angle between them, the three rings of the luopan and which one to read, and what to do when the answer falls on a line. 15 min
  3. 03 The Lo Shu square Nine numbers in a grid, every line of which adds to fifteen. The figure behind the bagua map, the Flying Star charts and every practitioner who talks about “the one” or “the nine.” Where it came from and what the Han made of it, its companion the river chart, the path its numbers trace, the square in the mathematics of Song China and Renaissance Europe, and what it does when it is laid over a flat. 13 min
  4. 04 Numbers, floors and doors What the tradition counts and what it merely fears. The River Chart and the Lo Shu, odd numbers as yang and even as yin, the nine on the emperor’s door and the nails that told a rank; the four that sounds like death and the eight that sounds like wealth, the floors that towers leave out and what a number fetches at sale; the fourth of the month; and why a classical reading never asks your house number. 14 min
  5. 05 Eight Mansions The compass method most people meet first. A number from your year of birth, two groups of directions, eight names for the eight ways a bed or a desk can face, the Qing text it comes from and the trigram families behind it, the whole table on one sheet, a couple worked through, and the one problem the method does not solve. 14 min
  6. 06 The Four Pillars The reading a practitioner most often attaches to a house is not feng shui but astrology, and the two share every part. The stems and branches that name the years, the months, the days and the hours; the chart of eight characters, its day master and the element it is read as lacking; how that element becomes a colour on a wall; what the tradition’s own personal method, the kua, does instead; and what the research on birth years and the dragon’s children actually shows. 14 min
  7. 07 The twelve animals The zodiac everyone knows is one twelfth of the calendar and the part of it a house meets most often; the twelve branches as a clock, a calendar and a compass at once, the six clashes across the ring, the year’s animal and the three sectors the almanac asks a household to leave alone, computed for the next twelve years; where the animals came from and what they are not; and what a birth animal has to do with a bed, which is less than the paperbacks say and more than nothing. 13 min
  8. 08 Flying Stars: how a chart is built The Compass School’s method of time. Nine numbers, a period of twenty years, a facing direction, and a grid that claims to say where a house is strong this decade. How the chart is made, what it says, and what to make of it. 17 min
  9. 09 Choosing a day The tradition has a where and a when. The luopan answers the first; the almanac answers the second, and a household that has sited its house still asks it for the day to move in, to open the shop, to raise the roof or to bury. What the almanac is, the twelve officers that govern its days, the spirits that move round its year, what the practitioners use it for, and what a calendar can and cannot do. 13 min
  10. 10 The house through the year The tradition kept a house by the calendar as well as by the compass. The sun’s year in twenty-four terms and the moon’s in twelve months, the sweeping of the dust and the Kitchen God’s departure, the couplets and the door gods at New Year, the graves at Qingming, the herbs at the door in the fifth month, the moon in the eighth, the solstice; the house that changed with the seasons; and what the research says about the winter light. 14 min
  11. 11 The texts What the tradition actually wrote down, and when. The burial classic and its three sections, the house-siting classics and the canon that kept one of them, the manuals of the compass schools, the shelf the imperial librarians put them all on and what they wrote beside it, the Western accounts, and the paperbacks, with what each is good for and what it cannot be asked to say. 12 min
  12. 12 Feng shui and religion Is feng shui a religion? It is not, and it has never lived anywhere else. What the imperial bibliographies filed it under and why that was a verdict; the Confucian rite that sent the mourners to a geomancer; the Buddhist monastery and the Daoist temple sited by the same sentence as a farmhouse; the court that kept geomancers on the calendar staff; the missionaries who found it in their way, the reformers who listed it as superstition and the revolution that burned the compasses; and the government that pays for it today. 14 min
  13. 13 The yin house Feng shui was a way of siting graves before it was a way of arranging rooms. The burial texts and the site they describe; the five things a geomancer read, in order; the belief that a good grave feeds the living; the lineages that fought over hills and the officials who tried to stop them; the tomb built as a valley in miniature; and what the tradition carried across from the dead to the living when it turned to houses. 15 min
  14. 14 Evidence and feng shui What has actually been studied, what has not, and what the studies that exist can and cannot say about a tradition that was never designed to be tested. The site’s evidence label, explained at length. 12 min

Path 05 · 14 articles · 191 min

A life in the house

The tradition kept a house by the calendar as well as the compass: the year’s round, the gods in their places, and the rooms a household needs at each age.

  1. 01 The house through the year The tradition kept a house by the calendar as well as by the compass. The sun’s year in twenty-four terms and the moon’s in twelve months, the sweeping of the dust and the Kitchen God’s departure, the couplets and the door gods at New Year, the graves at Qingming, the herbs at the door in the fifth month, the moon in the eighth, the solstice; the house that changed with the seasons; and what the research says about the winter light. 14 min
  2. 02 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. 14 min
  3. 03 The house for a wedding The red affairs against the white. The tradition made a room, a bed and a day for a marriage and marked the house with a character; what the bridal chamber was and how it was set, the bed installed on its own day by a woman of good fortune, the double happiness on the gate, the threshold stepped over and the tea in the hall; what the two households asked a geomancer; the couple’s two kua and the bed that serves both; and what the wedding does to a house that the stress research measured. 12 min
  4. 04 The baby’s room The tradition’s first year and the paediatricians’ agree on the room and disagree on almost nothing else. The fetus spirit that stops a household drilling while a woman is expecting; the confinement month, its closed warm room and what the research makes of it; the bed mother and the cot she guards; where the cot goes, by the safe-sleep guidance and the command position; the first year’s rites, from the third-day bath to the choosing test; and the room a child grows out of. 14 min
  5. 05 The children’s room A bedroom that is also a workroom and a playroom, for someone still changing. The tradition applies its bedroom rules with two changes of emphasis; the sleep science applies with more force than anywhere else in the house, and gives the hours by age; the bunk bed, the shared room, the desk that should not face the bed, the room that has to change three times in fifteen years, and the floor that is where a child actually lives. 12 min
  6. 06 The student’s desk The tradition had a god for examinations and a position for the desk, and the research has measured the light and the noise a child works by. The scholar’s studio as the Ming connoisseurs kept it and the exam season as the households kept it; the desk with a wall behind and the window on the far side of the writing hand; the Wenchang position by the house and by the year of birth, computed, and what it is worth; daylight and reading scores, aircraft noise and comprehension; and a child’s room before and after an afternoon’s moving. 15 min
  7. 07 The house for old age The tradition gave its elders the best room in the house and the research says why that was right. The principal hall of the courtyard house and who slept either side of it; what a room for later life asks that a younger room does not, the light doubled, the bed a hand higher, the stair with two rails, the threshold that is no threshold; the falls that the home causes and the modifications that prevent them; and what a designer adds to a tradition that kept its elders warm and near the sun. 15 min
  8. 08 Recovering at home The tradition kept a room for the sick and the research has measured what the room does. The sickroom as the manuals arranged it, the bed to the heavenly doctor and the almanac’s days for physic; the seven things a room for a long illness needs, drawn on one plan; what a window onto trees did to forty-six patients in Pennsylvania and a sunny room to the depressed; the visitor’s chair, the table, the low light; and the one claim the tradition made about illness that the site does not. 12 min
  9. 09 Moving house The tradition moved house as a rite and the research describes it as a stressor, and both are right. The almanac’s day for entering a house, the stove and the rice pot that go in first, the bed settled on its own day and slept in that night, the door dressed, the meal with the door open; the old house left clean; the order in which to unpack a home so that the first night is a night; and what the studies of residential moves say about children and the first year. 13 min
  10. 10 On the road The tradition’s traveller had an almanac and an inn, and the modern one has a hotel room and a clock that has been left behind. The almanac’s day for setting out and the direction not to travel; the first night in a strange room, which the brain keeps half awake, and what the tradition’s bed rules do about it; the ten minutes that make a hotel room the site’s room; light after a long flight, by the direction flown; and the house left behind. 14 min
  11. 11 Fire in the house The tradition gave fire a god, a wall and a set of rules, and the fire research gives it minutes. The stove as the house’s one fire and what the manuals asked of it; the Western hearth read as the wall of honour, the mantel as the altar table and the seats in an arc; candles, lamps and incense, and where the tradition put them; the element of Fire in a room, and the rooms it does not belong in; and what a closed bedroom door, a heat alarm and a clear route do with the minutes a fire allows. 14 min
  12. 12 Animals in the house The tradition kept fish for a pun, a tortoise for its years, a bird for the morning and a dog for the gate, and the research has since asked what an animal in a house is worth. The goldfish of the courtyard and the arowana of the office; the nine fish and the one black; the tortoise, the cranes and the caged bird; the dog that comes to the house and the cat the sayings mistrust; where each goes on a plan and where the manuals refuse them; and what four studies found a pet and a tank do to a heart, a blood pressure and a night’s sleep. 13 min
  13. 13 The house in mourning The tradition that began with graves had a rule for the house a death happened in, and the household kept it for a year. The white affairs against the red; the hall set for the wake, the coffin on the axis and the soul seat before it; the seven sevens, the hundredth day and the three years, with what the household did at each and did not do between; the geomancer’s two visits; what the rules kept a bereaved household from doing to its house, and what the stress research says they were right about. 15 min
  14. 14 Hiring a practitioner What a classical consultation is and what it is not. Who the master was and how the villages paid them; the visit in the order it is done, the brief, the street, the compass on the threshold, the rooms and the written report; what a good report contains; the fees and the red packet; the six signs of a reading and the six of a sale; and what the evidence says a consultation can and cannot change. 14 min

Path 06 · 12 articles · 146 min

Room by room

The house in the order a visitor walks it, from the threshold to the garden, with what the tradition asks of each room.

  1. 01 The entrance The mouth of qi, in the tradition’s phrase. The door through which everything comes in, the threshold the tradition raised and guarded, the first few steps inside it and what those steps should be furnished for, with the heights the joiners and the access codes give, and what the housing research says about a watched door. 12 min
  2. 02 Hallways and stairs The parts of a house nobody lives in, through which everything passes. The tradition reads corridors as rivers and stairs as falls, and asks that both be slowed, lit and turned. The corridor and its length, the doors that face each other, the stair that lands on the door, the rise and going a foot likes and the code’s limits, the counting of steps, the landing as an upstairs bright hall, and the light on the turn. 12 min
  3. 03 The living room The room with the most people and the most light. The hall of the courtyard house and the room that keeps its shape, the centre of the plan, seating with a back and the distances at which people talk, the room’s three ends and where the screen goes, and the light of the south. 12 min
  4. 04 The dining room A table is a small plan of the household. The tradition wants it round, away from the walls, with the host’s back covered and nobody sitting in the door. The banquet seating the rule descends from; the table sizes and the ninety centimetres each needs; who gets the corner; the light hung low over the food; where the room sits on the plan; and the table that is a desk by day. 12 min
  5. 05 The kitchen Fire and Water in one room, a metre apart. The god who lived over the stove and the rules he left, the brick stove the manuals were written for and where its mouth faced, the cook’s position, the work triangle with its numbers, the four layouts, and what the air in a kitchen actually contains. 12 min
  6. 06 The bathroom The room the classical house did not have, and the privy it did. What the yang-house manuals said about the latrine, what the twentieth century made of the bathroom when it arrived, which of its rules are old and which are recent, where the room goes on a plan and over what, the water seal the tradition never knew it was describing, and what the building science says about damp, air and the same room. 13 min
  7. 07 Bedroom feng shui The room the tradition cares about most, because it is where the body is unguarded for a third of its life. The yin end of the house, the bed the tradition slept in and what it taught, the command position, what may not hang over a sleeper or lie under one, the light and the dark with the numbers the sleep research gives, and what to do about the mirror. 11 min
  8. 08 The children’s room A bedroom that is also a workroom and a playroom, for someone still changing. The tradition applies its bedroom rules with two changes of emphasis; the sleep science applies with more force than anywhere else in the house, and gives the hours by age; the bunk bed, the shared room, the desk that should not face the bed, the room that has to change three times in fifteen years, and the floor that is where a child actually lives. 12 min
  9. 09 The guest room The last room in the house nobody has written about, and the only one arranged for a person who does not live there. What the compound did with a guest and why it was not a bedroom, the spare room that becomes the store and what that costs the household that owns it, what a stranger needs in a room that a household never notices it has, where the bed goes when the room is also a study, and the two nights a year the room is actually for. 12 min
  10. 10 Home office feng shui A desk is a small architecture. Where it faces decides whether the day feels exposed or held, and the tradition’s answer is the one it gives for the bed, with light added. The four conditions and the order to give them up in; the light across the page; what the camera sees on a call; the air in a closed room; the scholar’s studio the rule descends from; and how to keep work out of the bed. 14 min
  11. 11 The balcony The only outdoor room most people have, and the one the classical manuals never wrote a chapter on. What the veranda and the five-foot way of the old houses were for, the depth below which a balcony is a shelf and not a room, the rail read as a wall and the void read as the missing tortoise, how much of the view to keep and how much to plant out, and the question every balcony eventually faces, which is whether to glaze it in. 12 min
  12. 12 The outside Garden, balcony, approach. The part of the site the tradition was written for, read at the scale of a plot rather than a valley. The four guardians as hedges, the approach as a sequence, the water in front and the mouth it leaves by, what the Ming garden manual says about suiting the site, the research on green ground, and what a balcony can do about all of it when there is no plot at all. 12 min

Path 07 · 12 articles · 157 min

Furnishing it

What goes into a room once the walls are fixed, in the order it is usually bought, and the few things the manuals actually say about each.

  1. 01 The furniture of the tradition The rules of feng shui were written for rooms furnished in a particular way, and the furniture explains the rules. How the Chinese came down from the mat and up onto the chair, and what that did to every height in the house; the six pieces the manuals assume, the canopy bed, the heated bed, the screen, the altar table, the horseshoe chair and the square table for eight; the wall of honour of the hall with its scroll and its two armchairs; and what each piece taught the site’s guides. 14 min
  2. 02 Sofa placement The main seat is the command position for company. Where the sofa goes decides whether a living room is a place people face one another or a place they face the screen. The host’s seat the rule comes from, the three conditions, the circle and the distances at which it works, what stands behind a sofa that cannot have a wall, and where the screen goes. 13 min
  3. 03 Desk placement The command position, sitting down. Where a desk goes decides what is behind you, what is in front of you and where the light falls, and the tradition has an answer for each. The scholar’s studio the answer comes from, the three conditions, which side the window goes for a person who writes, the desk’s own numbers, the four desks that are not in a study, and the order in which to give things up. 12 min
  4. 04 Beams and corners A beam over the bed is the complaint practitioners hear most often, and the one with the plainest explanation. What the tradition says about beams, blades and corners, the house of beams it was written in and the one beam it honoured, the remedies in order with what each costs, the ceiling heights the codes and the research give, and where the perceptible case ends. 14 min
  5. 05 Levels, ceilings and floors The third dimension. The tradition reads a step down as a pool, a low ceiling as a beam, a loft as a hill and a basement as the ground itself. What it asks of houses on more than one level, and what the studies of ceiling height found. 18 min
  6. 06 Colour by element The five colour families the tradition gives the Five Elements, the directions the compass gives them, and how much of a room a colour should be allowed to decide. The five correct colours and the intermediate ones, the yellow that belonged to the emperor and the door that told your rank, what the research on colour actually finds, and why the finest tool in the system is the last to use. 14 min
  7. 07 Lighting The tradition has more to say about light than about anything else in a room, because light is what yin and yang look like indoors. Where the lamps go and at what height, what colour the light should be and when, the window as the first lamp, the three layers a designer works in, the numbers the research gives for the evening, and a room-by-room list. 13 min
  8. 08 Mirrors The object feng shui writing is most excited by, and the tradition most careful with. What the mirror was in China before it was a cure, where a mirror helps a room and where every school says it should not go, what the research says a mirror does to the person in front of it, and the three kinds of bagua mirror and what each actually does to a line of sight. 11 min
  9. 09 Art, images and objects What to hang and where. The tradition’s rule for pictures is the Form School’s site turned into a wall, something solid behind the seat and something with depth in front of it, and its rule for objects is shorter than the shops would like. The Ming wall that hung one scroll at a time, the gallery’s centre line, the subjects the manuals list, what the hospital studies found, and the short classical list of objects with the long modern one labelled as what it is. 11 min
  10. 10 Plants The tradition’s living element, and where it goes. Which corners a plant should stand in and which it should not; the trees the old manuals placed around a house; what the manuals say about leaves; the plants the shops sell as luck and the three the classical eye admired; how much light a plant actually needs in the corner it is put in; and what the research says about air, attention and the view. 13 min
  11. 11 Water features Water is the tradition’s word for wealth and its most argued-over object. Where a pond, a fountain or a fish tank belongs and where it does not; the shapes of water the texts read, embracing and cutting; the pool behind the house that the manuals never saw; the damp and the sound water brings indoors; the fish and their numbers; and what water does in a room that the tradition never claims for it. 11 min
  12. 12 Clutter and order The tradition’s oldest domestic rule and the one with the most evidence behind it. Why the manuals want the floor open, what counts as clutter and what does not, the five places it lands, the heights at which things should live, the paper that arrives at the door, and what the research on cluttered homes actually found. 13 min

Path 08 · 12 articles · 156 min

Where it came from

The scholarship rather than the practice: the word, the texts, the schools, the landscape they were written for, and what can be said for any of it.

  1. 01 Qi, and what the word does Feng shui’s central term is not a substance, a field or a force. It is a way of describing how a place behaves. What the character shows, what the philosophers and the physicians made of it, what the Zangshu’s three sentences actually say, what the tradition claims and does not, and how to use the word without pretending it is physics. 12 min
  2. 02 A history of feng shui Two thousand years of siting practice, one century of prohibition and forty years of paperback simplification. Where the discipline came from, what it was for, and how it reached your living room. 11 min
  3. 03 The texts What the tradition actually wrote down, and when. The burial classic and its three sections, the house-siting classics and the canon that kept one of them, the manuals of the compass schools, the shelf the imperial librarians put them all on and what they wrote beside it, the Western accounts, and the paperbacks, with what each is good for and what it cannot be asked to say. 12 min
  4. 04 The schools of feng shui Form, Compass and the Black Sect. Three ways of reading a house that agree on the bedroom and disagree about where your wealth corner is, explained so that you can tell which one a book is using. Where the two classical schools came from and who named them, what each reads and with what, the modern graft and its date, and a test for any page. 12 min
  5. 05 The dragon veins The Form School read the mountains of a continent as one tree. Kunlun as the ancestor of every hill and the three trunk dragons that run from it to the sea; how a vein is followed from the ancestor mountain through its passes to the lair; the nine star peaks by which a skyline is named, and which are lucky; what a living dragon is and a dead one; and what a geologist and a psychologist see in the same hill the geomancer calls a wolf. 14 min
  6. 06 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. 14 min
  7. 07 The yin house Feng shui was a way of siting graves before it was a way of arranging rooms. The burial texts and the site they describe; the five things a geomancer read, in order; the belief that a good grave feeds the living; the lineages that fought over hills and the officials who tried to stop them; the tomb built as a valley in miniature; and what the tradition carried across from the dead to the living when it turned to houses. 15 min
  8. 08 The body and the house Feng shui speaks the language of Chinese medicine, and the medicine spoke it first. Qi, the channels and the points, wind as the thing that scatters; the one table of five phases that sorts organs and rooms alike; why the Book of Burial calls the site a xue, which is the physician’s word for a point; what the physicians read in a pulse and the geomancers in a hill; and where the shared vocabulary stops being a shared claim. 14 min
  9. 09 Feng shui in the city The tradition was written for hills and it is practised, today, mostly in towers. How Hong Kong read its two banks and the block built between them; the holes left through buildings for the dragon; the theme park whose gate was turned twelve degrees; the compensation a government pays for a disturbed hillside; what the city’s reading has in common with the planner’s view corridors and wind paths; and which of the famous stories are true. 15 min
  10. 10 Siting elsewhere Every building culture wrote down how to choose a site and turn a house, and feng shui is the one the West learned the word for. The sand divination the word geomancy really meant and how the missionaries misapplied it; the vastu of India, a man lying in a square with a deity at every corner; Vitruvius on the healthy site, the winds and the rooms by their aspect, written in Rome before Christ; what the three traditions agree on, which is most of the sensible part; and what only the Chinese one did. 14 min
  11. 11 Feng shui beyond China Where the tradition went, and what it became there. Korea’s pungsu sited a capital and argued about which way the palace should face; Japan’s court kept a calendar of closed directions and its house-reading kept the demon gate; Vietnam’s last dynasty built a citadel and its tombs to the Form School’s plan; the cities of the diaspora kept the practice alive and made it commercial; the West met it in a missionary’s pamphlet and again in a paperback. 11 min
  12. 12 Evidence and feng shui What has actually been studied, what has not, and what the studies that exist can and cannot say about a tradition that was never designed to be tested. The site’s evidence label, explained at length. 12 min

Path 09 · 9 articles · 126 min

Places that are not homes

The tradition was applied to shops, schools and restaurants before it was applied to flats, and the rules change when the room is not yours.

  1. 01 Workplaces The tradition applied to the office and the shop. The city where a bank’s escalators were set on a geomancer’s advice, the till the commercial manuals place and the one most shops have, the reception that sees the door, the desk with a wall behind it in an open plan, the corner office that has always meant one thing, and the meeting room’s host. What transfers from the house, and what the research on offices adds. 18 min
  2. 02 Home office feng shui A desk is a small architecture. Where it faces decides whether the day feels exposed or held, and the tradition’s answer is the one it gives for the bed, with light added. The four conditions and the order to give them up in; the light across the page; what the camera sees on a call; the air in a closed room; the scholar’s studio the rule descends from; and how to keep work out of the bed. 14 min
  3. 03 The classroom The room the tradition built for study before it built a desk, the academy on its axis with the master’s seat on the north wall and the library where the ground rises; the modern classroom read the same way, the windows on the pupils’ left, the teacher in command, the door at the front and the board across the light; what the classroom research found, the daylight study of twenty-one thousand pupils and the survey that put a sixth of a year’s progress down to the room; and the seat in the middle of the front rows that asks the questions. 12 min
  4. 04 The student’s desk The tradition had a god for examinations and a position for the desk, and the research has measured the light and the noise a child works by. The scholar’s studio as the Ming connoisseurs kept it and the exam season as the households kept it; the desk with a wall behind and the window on the far side of the writing hand; the Wenchang position by the house and by the year of birth, computed, and what it is worth; daylight and reading scores, aircraft noise and comprehension; and a child’s room before and after an afternoon’s moving. 15 min
  5. 05 The shop The oldest paid consultation in the trade and the one the manuals were written for, since the men who wrote them were paid by merchants. The mouth of the shop and the bright hall inside it, the counter where the shopkeeper can see who comes in, the god of wealth on the side wall, the path that winds and the strip inside the door that nobody sees, what the shopping research counted with a stopwatch, and the difference between arranging a room and promising a profit. 13 min
  6. 06 The restaurant and the café The one workplace the tradition wrote most about after the shop, and the one the seating research has measured best; the teahouse and the eating house of the manuals, with the till, the stove, the god of wealth and the guest’s seat; which table a customer takes and why, ranked; the spacing and the stays the Cornell studies timed; the plan of a café read by both at once; and what an owner does with a room whose middle nobody wants to sit in. 13 min
  7. 07 The shophouse The house the tradition built when it went to the coast and the colonies, a lot five metres wide and thirty deep with a shop at the street and the family behind and above; the five-foot way, the air well and the sequence of rooms along one axis, which is the courtyard house stood on end; how the manuals read a house with no sides; what the section does for the air, measured; and what a household living over a shop today takes from it. 13 min
  8. 08 The shared flat A flat of three adults who are not a family is the house the tradition never wrote for and the one it had a plan for anyway; the compound divided among households, which Beijing called the big mixed courtyard; how to read a shared flat as three houses and a hall, each room set as a house is set and the kitchen kept as the hall; the door of a room as a front door; what the crowding research says the plan is for; and the two rules that keep a house-share from becoming a corridor of strangers. 15 min
  9. 09 Rented homes What the tradition can do in a home whose walls, windows and kitchen belong to someone else. The two lists the manuals keep, the one a tenant has entire; what cannot be changed and what answers it; the tenant’s toolkit with its sizes; the order to unpack on the first day; and the case for spending only on what leaves in the van. 13 min
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