Ask three people what feng shui is and you may hear three different answers — because feng shui has never been one system. It is a family of related crafts that grew up along Chinese river valleys for some three thousand years, written down in manuals, argued over by rival masters, and carried across Asia in the bags of surveyors. Two great traditions anchor the family, and a surprising amount of practical intelligence is packed inside them.
Four methods of the craft
Classical manuals divide the work into four methods. Form method (形法) reads terrain — it chooses where to build. Principle method (理法) works out orientation — how a building should sit on the chosen ground. Date method (日法) fixes timing, selecting the season and day for breaking ground. Talisman method (符鎮法) handles remedies, the tradition's way of correcting a site that cannot be changed. Read together, they describe a complete building workflow: pick the place, set the plan, choose the moment, fix what you cannot move. Strip away the cosmology and you have site analysis, master planning, scheduling, and retrofit design.
The Form School — reading the landscape
The Form School (形勢派) is the elder tradition, and its vocabulary is a small encyclopedia of landscape observation. Mi long — "chasing the dragon" — means tracing a mountain ridge to its origin, reading how ranges descend and branch. Cha sha — "examining the guard hills" — studies the lower hills that flank and shelter a site. Guan shui observes water: where it slows, where it bends, where it gathers. Dian xue — "locating the point" — pinpoints the exact spot where all the surrounding forms converge. Qu xiang fixes the facing. The ideal result, repeated in a thousand manuals, is an "armchair" of land: high ground behind, low open ground and water in front, flanks embraced. It is, in effect, a grammar for reading shelter, drainage, sunlight and access — written as landscape poetry. The painting above is built on exactly that grammar: our Wealth Bowl landscape print sets a golden bowl where the water gathers, mountains embracing behind.
The Compass School — measuring the unseen
The Compass School (理氣派) brought instruments into the art. Its tool, the luo pan, is a compass pushed to elaboration: a central needle ringed by dozens of concentric scales — the eight trigrams, the twenty-four directions, the heavenly stems and earthly branches of the Chinese calendar, ring upon ring. Where the Form School reads a mountain, the Compass School reads a coordinate: it treats a building as a point where the geometry of sky and ground intersect, and it records that intersection the way an astronomer records a position. The two schools were rivals for centuries — "form without principle is untrustworthy; principle without form is empty talk," as the saying went — but most working masters learned both. Both tools survive as prints in our collection: the master's luo pan compass for the Compass School, the wealth-bowl landscape for the Form School.
One family, many branches
From these two trunks grew many branches. The Form School produced the Luan Tou, Xing Xiang and Xing Fa lineages. The Compass School diversified into a remarkable array of schools — the Eight Mansions, the Three Combinations, the Flying Stars of the Xuan Kong lineage, and a dozen others, each with its own way of relating direction, season and number. It helps to think of them less as rival doctrines than as dialects: the same grammatical assumptions, pronounced differently by different regional traditions.
Homes for the living, sites for the ancestors
Finally, the tradition distinguishes two applications. Yang zhai — the feng shui of houses for the living — concerns everything from a city's site to a room's layout, and it is the branch most alive in interior design today. Yin zhai concerned the siting of tombs, and it drove much of the historical record: imperial courts employed geomancers the way modern governments employ surveyors. Ming China's most famous building campaign, the construction of the imperial tombs at Tianshou Mountain, began with a siting decision made in exactly this tradition.
See the instruments themselves: our luo pan compass print renders the master's tool in gallery detail, and our Feng Shui 101 introduction covers the tradition's core ideas. The classical emblems of both schools live in our feng shui collection.