Feng Shui Does Not Ask for Unobstructed Airflow

Macau Business has put out a special issue on traditions and beliefs, and one piece in it, published online on November 1, asks how four centuries of Portuguese building in Macau came to stand beside Chinese siting practice without either giving way. It is a careful article. It names its scholars, cites four books, and closes by asking whether the fit was a deliberate synthesis or an indirect by-product of the two populations having been kept apart — a question it puts and declines to answer. Two of its claims can be checked against the tradition itself. One of them is right, and more precise than the article makes it. The other has the discipline's founding sentence the wrong way round.

The name is two things, and only one of them is wanted

Feng shui is two words, wind and water, and the sentence that put them together explains the pairing. The Zang Shu, the Book of Burial, traditionally attributed to the Jin dynasty scholar Guo Pu (276–324), carries the oldest definition of the term: qi rides the wind and scatters; it meets water and halts; the ancients gathered it so that it would not scatter and guided it so that it would come to rest, and so the thing was called wind and water. Read it once and the asymmetry is plain. Water is what stops qi, and is therefore sought. Wind is what disperses it, and is therefore shut out. The same text sets the order a few lines later: obtaining water comes first, sheltering from the wind second.

So the landform half of the discipline is, from end to end, an argument about shelter. A site is read for what encloses it: ground rising behind it, arms of higher ground to either side, an opening in front with water across it. The fault that reading hunts for is exposure. A summit, a spur with nothing at its back, a flat plain with the wind crossing it unchecked — these are the cases the Form School texts treat as poor, and they are poor for one stated reason, which is that nothing there holds anything in place.

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By contrast, Chinese villagers settled on the flat coastal areas, following feng shui principles, which call for airflow to be free and unobstructed.

That is the article's account of where the Chinese population settled: flat coastal land, following feng shui, because feng shui wants air to move freely. The second half of that sentence inverts the text the discipline is named after. Unobstructed airflow is not what the siting rule asks for. It is the condition the rule is written against.

Two things are worth saying before this is laid at anybody's door. The first is that the sentence has traveled: a scholar's explanation, into a magazine feature, into a Chinese edition of that feature, and the inversion could have entered at any step. So what is wrong is the claim as printed, and attributing it further up the chain than that would be unfair. The second is that there is a true statement standing very close to it, and the article nearly has hold of it. Ventilation is sound building sense, and the dwelling branch of this tradition does care whether air reaches the rooms of a house. But that is a judgment about a building's inside, and the claim here is about where a village was put. Those are two different questions in the tradition, answered out of different books.

And on the question actually being asked, the coastal siting is defensible — just not for the reason given. Obtaining water comes first, and a fishing settlement on the shore has water in front of it in the most literal way available. The classical reading would approve of that ground and then ask what was behind it. Which is the ordinary difficulty with a fit between a practice and a place: the boats also had to land somewhere.

The square is the half that checks out

The article's other claim concerns Cathedral Square, in the historic center, and it is the stronger of the two. It reports that the sharp angles of two walls on the square were rounded off to satisfy feng shui, and a decorative central fountain installed, which it reads as the water method of the tradition answering Macau's Baroque habits. That is correct, and the public record is more specific than the article is. Macau Memory, the territory's public history archive, carries an account from a 2014 book on Macau's squares by Zhu Rong and Wu Yao: after wide public consultation and expert review, the 2004 restoration combined Chinese feng shui ideas with Portuguese architectural style, took away two sharp angles, laid Portuguese crushed-stone paving, added a small fountain, and cleared away or concealed the trash bins and transformer boxes that broke up the space.

The detail that matters is which two angles. Not every corner of the square — the two that faced directly down the lanes running into it, the one coming from St. Dominic's and the one beside the Cathedral, Travessa da Sé. That is exactly how the rule is stated. A sharp corner is not read as an affliction because it is sharp. It is read as one when something is aimed along it: a wall's edge pointing at a door, a street running at a corner. What is being read is a line of approach, and the remedy is to take the edge off whatever sits at the end of that line. Two lanes, two angles, and the corners with no lane pointing at them left as they were. A practitioner would recognize that as the rule applied rather than the vocabulary borrowed.

What we take from it

The useful thing about a piece like this is not the verdict on it. It is that both of its claims could be checked at all, and checked by different means: one against a sentence in a fourth-century text, one against the public record of a restoration twenty-two years ago. Most writing that sets feng shui beside architecture offers neither, and asks to be taken on atmosphere. This one named its scholars and its books, so its claims have edges — and an article with edges is worth more when it is half wrong than a vague one that could not be wrong at all.

Our home reading is free, and it will draw a building's chart from its facing and the year it was built. It reads the compass half of the discipline, and it does not read landform: it cannot see the corner of the building across from yours, or the road running at your door, because we do not have your street. The classics put that half first, which is worth knowing about any calculation, ours included. A chart refines a site; it does not rescue one. If a line is running at your door, the chart is not the thing that answers it.