Introduction: Institutional Texts and the Mantic Arts Tradition
The establishment of architectural institutions in ancient China was often interwoven with two distinct threads: official standards and popular mantic arts. The Building Standards (Yingzao Fashi), compiled by Li Jie in the second year of the Chongning reign of the Northern Song (1103), stands as the most complete extant official architectural treatise, systematically prescribing modular proportions, labor quotas, and material specifications, yet it rarely addresses fengshui directly. Meanwhile, contemporary geomantic works such as the New Book of Geography (Dili Xinshu) elaborate in detail on landforms, qi theory, and orientation selection. Though the two appear to belong to separate textual systems, they permeated each other in historical practice. Taking textual traditions as its point of entry, this article traces the evolution of official institutions from the Rites of Zhou: Records of Examination of Craftsmen (Zhouli: Kaogongji) to the Building Standards, as well as the mantic lineage of fengshui texts from the Book of Burial (Zangshu) to the New Book of Geography, exploring their interaction in architectural siting, layout, and design. It further reveals how institutional texts absorbed or excluded mantic knowledge, and how this tension influenced later architectural practice.
1. The Origins and Transformation of Official Institutional Texts
The textualization of China's official architectural institutions can be traced back to the systems of "the craftsman establishes the state" and "the craftsman lays out the capital" recorded in The Records of Trades and Crafts of the Rites of Zhou. Among these, the layout principle of "ancestral temple on the left, altar of soil and grain on the right; court facing forward, market to the rear," though regarded by later Confucians as the ideal blueprint for the royal capital planning of the Zhou dynasty, did not involve geomantic judgments of auspicious or inauspicious directions, but rather emphasized ritual order and functional zoning. By the Tang dynasty, The Six Statutes of the Great Tang incorporated the responsibilities of the Directorate of Public Works and engineering standards into the national administrative code, marking a further bureaucratization of architectural institutions. However, these texts mostly focused on official division of labor and engineering management, and their records of specific design methods and material and labor expenditures remained notably sparse.
During the Yuanyou era of the Northern Song, the Directorate of Public Works was ordered to compile the Building Standards. Later, because the "Yuanyou Standards" suffered from the defect of containing "only material specifications, with no system for modified use of materials," an edict in the fourth year of Shaosheng (1097) ordered Li Jie to undertake a revision. The work was completed in the third year of Yuanfu (1100), and in the second year of Chongning (1103) it was carved onto woodblocks and promulgated. The book comprises thirty-four volumes, divided into five parts: terminology, regulations for each type of work, labor quotas, material specifications, and illustrations. For the first time, it unified architectural design and construction standards through the modular system of "cai-fen" (timber grades). The textual characteristic of the Building Standards lies in its technical rationality: it decomposed timber-frame architecture into thirteen types of work—earthworks and fortifications, stonework, major carpentry, minor carpentry, carving, turning, sawing, bamboo work, tiling, plastering, polychrome painting, brickwork, and kiln work—specifying the forms and labor-materials for each, with almost no involvement of the building's external environment or directional selection.
This technicizing tendency was no accident. In the mid-Northern Song, with the development of the urban economy and state-run handicrafts, the court needed a calculable and assessable system of engineering quotas. Li Jie himself was a vice director of the Directorate of Public Works, whose duty was to "guard against irregularities in labor and materials," not to conduct geomantic surveys. Therefore, the textual tradition of the Building Standards was essentially a product of bureaucratic technical rationality, maintaining an ambiguous relationship with the geomancy arts prevalent among the people during the same period. It is worth noting, however, that the book's records of "taking alignment" and "leveling the ground"—for instance, using the gnomon and shadow to determine north-south in "taking alignment"—already implied a need for measuring architectural orientation, leaving a technical interface for the later convergence of feng shui and official institutions.
2. The Genealogy and Core Concepts of Feng Shui Texts
Developing in parallel with the texts of the official system was the textual tradition of divination and geomancy. The term feng shui appears relatively early in The Book of Burial, attributed to the Jin dynasty figure Guo Pu, which proposes the classic proposition that "qi disperses when it rides the wind, and halts when it meets a boundary of water," and emphasizes that "obtaining water is paramount, and storing wind is secondary." However, the date of the Book of Burial's composition is much disputed in scholarly circles, with the mainstream view holding that its text gradually took shape between the Tang and Song dynasties. Before the Tang dynasty, the art of siting was mostly called "xingfa" (form-and-method) or "kanyu" (canopy-and-chariot), and the Bibliography of the Book of Han listed the "xingfa masters" under the divination section, alongside the "five phases masters," showing that its classification of knowledge had already taken preliminary shape.
By the turn of the Tang and Song dynasties, feng shui texts had split into two major schools: one was the "xingshi school," also called the "xingfa school" or the "Jiangxi school," which took the examination of mountain-and-river dragon veins and the orientation of sand and water as its core, with a representative figure such as Yang Yunsong of the Tang dynasty, whose Classic of Shaking the Dragon and Classic of Doubting the Dragon specifically discuss the forms of mountain dragons descending their veins and forming nodes; the other was the "liqi school," also called the "ancestral temple school" or the "Fujian school," which took luopan orientation, the mutual generation and overcoming of the five phases, and the calculation of hexagram lines as its core, and to which the Book of Dwellings, attributed to the Yellow Emperor, and Lai Wenjun's Chapters on Urging Office of the Song dynasty may be assigned. Although the two schools differed greatly in method, they shared a set of core concepts: qi, momentum, form, orientation, and the five phases. These concepts were not purely metaphysical; the judgments of "momentum" and "form" actually contained empirical observation of terrain, hydrology, sunlight, and wind direction.
During the reign of Emperor Renzong of the Northern Song, the court once organized the compilation of geomantic texts. In the third year of Jingyou (1036), because "the populace possessed a great many yin-yang books, among which there were many contradictions," Renzong ordered Wang Zhu of the Directorate of Astronomy and others to collate yin-yang and geographical books, producing the New Book of Geography in thirty fascicles. This book synthesized the then-popular theories of the favorable orientations of the five surnames, the zhaomu ordering of surnames, and mountain-and-water configurations, and supplied them with illustrative diagrams, making it an earlier extant officially compiled geomantic document. Its appearance shows that feng shui knowledge had become highly textualized by the Song dynasty and sought to enter the official knowledge system. Unlike the purely technical path of the Treatise on Architectural Methods, the New Book of Geography directly linked directional auspiciousness and inauspiciousness to family destiny, with the goal of selecting sites for burying kin and building dwellings, which provided a textual basis for the later combination of feng shui and architectural institutions.
3. The Modular System and the Dispute over Orientation: A Textual Comparison
If The Building Standards and contemporaneous fengshui texts are placed side by side, a fundamental difference in intellectual orientation between the two becomes apparent. The core of The Building Standards is the "cai fen" module, that is, "in the system of constructing any building, timber is always taken as the ancestor," dividing timber into eight grades to be selected according to building rank. What this modular design pursues is the internal harmony of structure and proportion, not the auspiciousness or inauspiciousness of the external environment. The records in the book concerning "leveling" and "orientation" serve only as basic steps in construction surveying and do not involve compass-based directional theory. In other words, The Building Standards addresses the question of "how to build," whereas fengshui texts address the questions of "where to build" and "facing which direction."
In actual architectural practice, however, the two were by no means clearly distinct. Taking the Northern Song capital of Dongjing as an example, the layout of its palace city generally followed the ritual axis, but the orientation of the city gates and major halls was also influenced by the geomantic ideas of the time. As recorded in the "Geographical Treatise" of the History of Song, the outer city of Dongjing was "fifty li and one hundred sixty-five paces in circumference," and the positions and names of its gates, such as "Jinglong Gate" and "Tianbo Gate," mostly corresponded to the directions of the eight trigrams and the attributes of the five phases. Similarly, in Lin'an of the Southern Song, although constrained by topography so that the palace city faced south and sat north, the main government offices and ritual buildings still strove to conform to the fengshui principle of "embracing yang and turning the back to yin." This shows that even in official architecture, fengshui often served as a latent basis for choosing orientation.
From the textual level, the "silence" of The Building Standards regarding fengshui was not an unintentional oversight but an institutional separation. The responsibility of the Directorate of Construction lay in building according to plans and calculating labor and materials, while fengshui affairs were handled by the Directorate of Astronomy or by popular yin-yang specialists. This division of labor is reflected in the Song official system. As recorded in the Draft Compilation of Song Administrative Documents, whenever palaces or tombs were repaired or built, it was often ordered that "the Directorate of Astronomy select the day" and "yin-yang officials inspect the site." Therefore, the separation between official institutional texts and fengshui texts was in fact the result of official division of duties. But by the Ming and Qing dynasties, with the widespread publication of popular craftsmen's manuals such as The Classic of Lu Ban, fengshui formulas and construction methods began to be mixed within the same text, and only then did the boundary between the two gradually blur.
4. From The Classic of Lu Ban to the Engineering Methods and Regulations: Convergence and Discipline
The Classic of Lu Ban, published during the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty under the full title The Newly Engraved Capital Edition of the Master Craftsman Lu Ban's Classic of Carving and Chiseling, the Craftsman's Mirror, was a practical manual for folk carpenters. Unlike the official stance of the Building Standards, The Classic of Lu Ban fused construction dimensions and furniture-making methods with auspicious date selection, talismanic incantations, and feng shui formulas. For example, the book lists the use of the "Lu Ban ruler," which divides the dimensions of doors, windows, beds, and other items into eight characters—"wealth," "illness," "separation," "righteousness," "office," "calamity," "harm," and "origin"—half auspicious and half inauspicious, directly guiding craftsmen in their work. This textual form shows that by the Ming dynasty, feng shui knowledge had become deeply embedded in folk building traditions and had become part of the craftsman's body of knowledge.
At the same time, the official building system of the Qing dynasty was summarized in the Engineering Methods and Regulations. The Engineering Methods and Regulations, published by the Ministry of Works in the twelfth year of the Yongzheng reign (1734) in seventy-four volumes, used the "doukou" as its module and stipulated twenty-seven types of building methods. Its technical approach was directly continuous with the Building Standards and still did not involve feng shui. Yet the siting and layout of Qing imperial buildings—such as the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Eastern and Western Qing Tombs—were without exception subjected to geomantic survey. Take the Eastern Qing Tombs as an example: when the Xiaoling Mausoleum was built in the second year of the Kangxi reign (1663), its location was repeatedly assessed by the Imperial Observatory and feng shui officials, and the southern foot of Changrui Mountain was ultimately chosen for its configuration of "coiling dragon and crouching tiger" and "embracing waters and encircling sands." This shows that although official institutional texts did not record feng shui, feng shui practice remained active throughout the highest levels of architectural activity.
This phenomenon of "separation in texts, convergence in practice" reflects the dual nature of traditional Chinese architectural knowledge: on the one hand, official texts pursued standardization and reproducibility to facilitate project management; on the other hand, feng shui texts provided environmental assessment and psychological reassurance, meeting widespread needs from the imperial court to the common people. The two formed separate systems at the textual level, yet alternately came into play at different stages of architectural activity—site selection, design, and construction. This complementary relationship meant that the institutional tradition represented by the Building Standards did not completely exclude feng shui, but rather placed it in another field of knowledge through the division of official duties.
5. The Implicit Presence of Feng Shui Concepts in Official Architecture
Although the Yingzao Fashi does not record feng shui, traces of feng shui in official architecture are not entirely absent. Taking the Forbidden City in Beijing as an example, its overall layout strictly follows the principle of "backing onto a mountain and facing water": to the north it relies on Jingshan (an artificially piled guardian mountain), and to the south it faces the Jinshui River, forming a configuration of "embracing yin and holding yang." This layout closely matches the ideal pattern described in The Book of Burial: "the Dark Warrior bows its head, the Vermilion Bird dances, the Azure Dragon winds, the White Tiger crouches." In addition, the gates and halls within the Forbidden City often carry Five Phases connotations in their orientation and names. For instance, the Hall of Literary Glory is located in the east and belongs to wood, while the Hall of Martial Valor is located in the west and belongs to metal. The arrangement of civil officials to the east and military officials to the west covertly corresponds to the principles of mutual generation and mutual overcoming among the Five Phases. Although these designs are not found in the clauses of the Yingzao Fashi, they are an implicit expression of feng shui concepts in spatial planning.
More concrete examples are found in the tomb system of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The sites of the Ming Thirteen Tombs and the Qing Eastern and Western Tombs were all surveyed jointly by officials of the Imperial Observatory and feng shui masters. Taking the Ming Thirteen Tombs as an example, the site of Changling was selected with the participation of the Jiangxi feng shui master Liao Junqing and others; its location was described as "the dragon vein originates from Kunlun, stretches for thousands of li, and forms its node at the Yan Mountains." This tracing of the "dragon vein" is clearly typical discourse of the xingshi school of feng shui. The arrangements of the "spirit way," "stone statues," and "Ming Tower" in the tomb architecture also had to conform to the feng shui principles of "welcoming qi" and "gathering qi." It can thus be seen that although the textual system of official architecture does not record feng shui, feng shui practice profoundly influenced the site selection and layout of imperial architecture through two channels: the official post system, such as the Imperial Observatory, and folk master craftsmen.
In local architecture, the influence of feng shui was even more direct. In Ming and Qing local gazetteers and genealogies, records of "divining a dwelling" and "surveying a site" are commonly seen. For example, the "four waters return to the hall" layout of Huizhou dwellings considered drainage functions while also implicitly carrying the feng shui meaning of "gathering wealth." The circular plan of Fujian tulou is related to the cosmological view of "a round heaven and a square earth" and to the numerological thought of "storing wind and gathering qi." Although these folk practices did not enter the textual system of official institutions, they ran parallel without contradiction to the technical system regulated by the Yingzao Fashi, together forming a complete picture of traditional Chinese architectural culture.
6. Knowledge Classification and Power in Textual Traditions
From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, the separation between the Yingzao Fashi and fengshui texts reflects the power structure within ancient Chinese knowledge classification. The official architectural system was incorporated into the state administrative apparatus, managed by institutions such as the Directorate of Construction and the Ministry of Works, and its texts, bearing names like "fashi" (statutes) and "zeli" (regulations), possessed legal force; whereas fengshui knowledge, though it held a place in official astronomical agencies (such as the Directorate of Astronomy and the Imperial Observatory), had texts mostly titled "jing" (classics), "shu" (books), or "pian" (chapters), occupying a semi-official or popular status. This classification of knowledge corresponded to the binary structure of "ritual" versus "custom" and "official" versus "popular."
However, the boundaries of knowledge were not absolute. After the Song dynasty, with the maturation of the civil examination system and the spread of printing, fengshui texts were published in large quantities, and their readership was no longer limited to diviners but included literati, bureaucrats, and craftsmen. Some scholar-officials began attempting to reconcile Confucian ritual with fengshui; for instance, Zhu Xi, in his Family Rituals, when discussing funerals and burials, emphasized "following ritual prescriptions" but also acknowledged the necessity of "selecting a site." This conciliatory attitude granted fengshui knowledge a certain degree of legitimacy among the scholar class. Meanwhile, official architectural texts such as the Yingzao Fashi were included in the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries during the Qing dynasty, becoming objects of academic study, with their technical content repeatedly cited, whereas fengshui was mostly relegated to the "divination arts" category, its status markedly lower.
This inequality in textual status directly influenced the transmission methods of the two types of knowledge. The official system was perpetuated through master-apprentice instruction, Ministry of Works regulations, and official engineering practice, its texts remaining relatively stable; fengshui knowledge, by contrast, relied on popular manuscripts, oral formulas, and family secrets, exhibiting greater variation. Yet it was precisely this flexibility that enabled fengshui to continuously absorb local knowledge and adapt to different geographical environments. Thus, the relationship between the Yingzao Fashi and fengshui texts was not one of simple opposition, but rather a division of labor and complementarity between institutional rationality and the divination tradition under specific historical conditions.
7. Academic Reassessment in Modern Times
At the beginning of the 20th century, with the introduction of Western architecture, Chinese scholars began to reexamine traditional architectural texts. In 1929, Zhu Qiqian and others founded the Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture in Beiping, taking the lead in conducting systematic collation and research on the Yingzao Fashi. Liang Sicheng, Liu Dunzhen, and others, through on-site surveying and mutual verification with documentary sources, revealed the modular system and design logic contained in the Yingzao Fashi, elevating it from a "craftsman's manual" to a "classic of architecture." This scholarly movement focused mainly on the technical level, and said relatively little about the relationship between feng shui and architecture, partly because the academic circles of the time regarded feng shui as "superstition" and deliberately excluded it from the narrative of architectural history.
However, since the 1980s, with the introduction of cultural history and anthropological methods, feng shui research has gradually shed the label of "superstition." Wang Qiheng and other scholars' research on the feng shui of Qing dynasty imperial tombs revealed the actual role of feng shui theory in site selection; Chen Zhihua, Li Qiuxiang, and others' research on vernacular architecture also pointed out the widespread presence of feng shui in village planning and dwelling construction. These studies corrected the previous bias of focusing only on official systems while neglecting folk techniques, making the relationship between the Yingzao Fashi and feng shui once again an academic topic.
At present, the mainstream view in academic circles holds that feng shui is an inseparable part of traditional Chinese architectural culture, but its relationship with official institutional texts is complex: it is neither completely integrated nor sharply opposed. Official texts provide a set of calculable and generalizable technical standards, while feng shui texts provide a set of evaluation systems based on environmental perception and symbolic meaning. The two satisfy different needs at different levels and together constitute the multiple dimensions of traditional Chinese architectural practice. The exploration of the Yingzao Fashi and the tradition of feng shui texts not only helps to understand the composition of knowledge in ancient architecture, but also provides a historical reference for the protection of contemporary architectural heritage.
Conclusion
The Yingzao Fashi and the fengshui textual tradition represent the two poles of ancient Chinese architectural knowledge: one pole is the standardized modular system under bureaucratic technical rationality, and the other is the environmental selection and symbolic practice within the folk mantic tradition. The two form separate genealogies in textual terms and belong to different official posts institutionally, yet they alternately exerted influence throughout the entire process of building activity. This model of "separate texts, convergent practice" not only ensured the controllability and efficiency of official projects but also left flexible space for fengshui concepts, enabling them to adapt to a wide range of needs from imperial palaces to vernacular dwellings.
From the Rites of Zhou: Records of Examining Crafts to the Yingzao Fashi, and then to the Engineering Methods and Regulations, official institutional texts always maintained the main line of technical rationality; while from the Book of Burial to the New Book of Geography, and then to the Lu Ban Jing, fengshui texts continuously absorbed local experience and cosmological concepts. Their interaction throughout history reminds us that traditional architectural culture is not a single knowledge system but a product of interwoven multiple textual traditions. If future research can further combine archaeological materials, craftsmen's manuscripts, and local archives, it may be possible to reconstruct in greater detail the collaborative mechanisms between fengshui and official institutions in specific construction cases, thereby deepening our understanding of the history of Chinese architectural institutions.