Myth: Feng shui began as "folk feng shui"

Feng Shui developed thousands of years ago in little villages of the Orient. It was called Folk Feng Shui because each village had there [sic] own guidelines on how to use it. Their livelihoods were dependent on it.

— Candace Czarny

Folk feng shui is just another McFengshui urban legend. McFengshui people like Czarny cannot prove that “folk feng shui” ever existed, or that each little village had their own guidelines.

• They cannot describe the timeline for when “folk feng shui” was supposedly in use, or identify when it was replaced by real feng shui.
• They cannot describe the techniques and instruments used in “folk feng shui” and relate them to current techniques.

You get a more realistic understanding of how feng shui was applied thousands of years ago by looking at the archaeological evidence. What follows is an outline of some of the archaeological discoveries.

Peligang culture (7000-5000 BCE)

Dwellings at Jiahu show elements of residential planning. In Phase I most dwellings were in the east, with a smaller group (perhaps of elites) at the west. In Phases II and III each house had its own cemetery at a distance. A moat surrounded the site.

Early Yangshao culture (c. 5000-4000 BCE)

Yanghao culture consists of a central group around Henan province and a western group around Shaanxi province.

Settlements of this culture are identified by five shapes of houses built somewhat below ground and at ground level. All settlements had a central plaza, a circle of houses surrounding the houses around the plaza, a moat encompassing all of the houses, and a cemetery outside the moat.

This echoes the famous yugong diagram that illustrated Zhou hegemony.

Middle Yangshao (4000-3500 BCE)

Large buildings begin to make an appearance.

Late Yangshao (c. 3500-3000 BCE)

Architectural innovations include uniformly square houses built at ground level, and multiroom rectangular houses. Floors were surfaced with lime.

Hongshan culture

Villagers’ homes in this northern culture (Liaoning and Inner Mongolia) were square or rectangular, situated on hill slopes overlooking rivers (sitting yin, facing yang). Niuheliang, the great ritual center, has round and square shapes that suggest an early presence of the gaitian cosmography (heaven-round, earth-square).

Important Sites

Dadiwan

A palace-like building (known as F901) sits on a north-south axis at the center of the settlement. The building faces south and there are three doors to enter the building from the south. The building (420 square meters — “as large as a basketball court”) consists of a large central room with smaller rooms at the east, west, and north. In the middle of the central room is a huge fireplace.

Gaositou

This site, 100 km south of Dadiwan, has palace-buildings like those at Dadiwan, also at the center of the site.

Anban

Two hundred km east of Dadiwan, Anban also features palace-like buildings at the center of the settlement — just like Dadiwan.

Walled towns

Walled towns tend to be rectangular with gates in the middle of a side. For example, gates in the middle of the north and south walls are found at Xishan, Pingliangtai, and Guchengzhai. Mengzhuang (the capital of the Wei state) had its sole gate in the eastern wall.

Interestingly, Xiangjiagou on the northern slope of Mt Zhuzu is the only settlement to break the pattern of siting on the southern slope. Archaeologists think the site had a special function, perhaps related to worship of the ocean spirit which occurred at Mt Zhuzu from ancient times until recently.

Lingjiatan

A well-documented divination device found here (dated roughly 2300 BCE) is virtually indistinguishable from devices used in modern turtle-trigram divination in Taiwan. The jade plaque stitched between turtle shells has markings Li Xueqin links with the later bagua diagrams, the liuren astrolabe, and the luopan. The owner was someone of high social status.

Who wrote the rules?

Archaeologists are aware that ritual power — such as early feng shui — was in the hands of “ritual practitioners.” Based on the evidence these practitioners were usually members of the ruling elite — often the rulers themselves. The specialists were divided into guilds that performed certain rituals (for example the Dui group of diviners who conducted puchan or crack-making — pyromancy).

Those without physical blemishes probably acquired their ritual knowledge as a form of education or indoctrination from a relative, or by traveling to a ritual center such as Xiangjiagou or Taosi — perhaps even Afanasevo culture or the Gushi/Jushi kingdom in eastern Turkestan.

A larger group of ritual practitioners likely included people with unusual physical characteristics: epilepsy (common among shamans) or the amniotic sac covering their face during birth (which indicated to medieval Italians that someone was a benandanti).