Feng shui is an ethnoscience that began in China more than 6,000 years ago. The earliest evidence of its use has been dated at 4000 BCE. David Pankenier notes in "The Cosmo-Political Background of Heaven's Mandate" (1995) that early Yangshao houses at Banpo were oriented to catch the midafternoon winter sun at its warmest, just after the solstice. (Some tribes in southern China still refer to this month as "House-building Month.")

Pankenier and his associates performed retrospective computation on the Chinese sky at the time of the Banpo dwellings (4000 BCE) to show that the asterism Yingshi ("Lay out the Hall" in the Warring States period and early Han era) corresponded to the sun's location at this time.

Several hundred years earlier the asterism Yingshi was known as Ding. It was used to mark the time of building of a capital city, according to the Shijing.

Feng shui works only for settled cultures. It has similar names throughout Asia in the cultures that adapted it for their use (Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, for example).

No cultures outside those influenced by the original Chinese science have been documented as having and using feng shui or anything remotely similar.