Today, the word “fengshui” (literally “wind and water”) usually conjures up images of living rooms and interior design. It has also become a global concept, popping up everywhere, from Netflix reality shows like Selling Sunset to blockbuster films like Crazy Rich Asians. This attention to fengshui, seen as essential for ensuring good vibes and positive energy, reflects a common perception. Yet in its original setting, fengshui had—and arguably still has—a more profound historical and social importance.
In his new book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China, MIT historian Tristan G Brown argues that fengshui played a crucial role on domestic, social, and even national scales in premodern China. From the imperial palaces of Beijing to the royal tombs of Shenyang, to the riverside towns of Jiangnan, and even to the hilltops of Sichuan’s countryside, emperors, scholars, and commoners sought to understand their relationships to the natural world through the evolving knowledge system of fengshui. Good fengshui—marked by lush trees, flowing water, and auspicious mountain shapes—held power to provide a peasant with progeny, a scholar with success, and a ruler with a country to rule. Fengshui mattered not because it protected environments (though it sometimes did) but because it protected society and enabled social reproduction over time, shaping the fabric of society. It was also considered essential for maintaining harmony between humans and their surroundings.

Since one can’t go back and interview people in the Qing era about their fengshui, Brown takes an ingenious approach by analyzing fengshui through the lens of the law. In pre-20th century China, people brought lawsuits based on damaged fengshui. The harms were considered real, as poor fengshui produced poor fortune: ill children, examination failures, and even droughts or fires. By analyzing hundreds of legal cases from Sichuan Province, Brown interrogates the arguments people and the state made for and against fengshui claims. This method shows how deeply fengshui was embedded in the social and legal fabric of the time.
Brown’s study reveals how fengshui was used in the Qing administration to maintain social hierarchies, regulate land use, and address legal disputes. This broad perspective invites readers to reconsider fengshui as a vital element in historical governance, with still relevant echoes. Brown shows us how fengshui mattered for everything from gravesites to mapping, the imperial examination system, the mining industry, and the era of Western colonial penetration into China, known as the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861-1895). This period involved significant reforms following military defeats and foreign concessions. Brown provides examples of fengshui-related conflicts between Chinese and Westerners that helped popularize the term “fengshui” in English and other Western languages. Ironically, while the word fengshui was adopted, the legal and cultural context in which it was practiced was not.
The book also delves into the tension between rationality and irrationality within fengshui practices. From my reading, fengshui seems to transform the “irrational” (feelings, vibes, etc.) into the “rational” by deploying rules and paradigms. Brown’s analysis inspires us to consider this apparent duality. This idea is rooted in traditional Chinese philosophy and is reflected in the concepts of 形 (xing)—representing fixed structure—and 象 (xiang)—representing temporal, ever-changing impressions. Brown uses the balance between these concepts to illustrate how fengshui can be a robust framework for understanding social dynamics and governance. This approach helps illustrate how power structures maintain authority and manage crises by balancing fixed and changing elements.
Despite the exhaustive research, the legal cases are primarily from Sichuan, with only a few from Beijing and Taiwan. One supposes that the patterns Brown observes are repeated throughout China, but that remains to be demonstrated. Elsewhere, Brown offers fascinating observations before quickly moving on to other points. For example, women generally did not bring lawsuits in Qing China, except for widows. Widows had a unique channel into the Qing legal system without living husbands to present lawsuits on their behalf. Since widows often needed to fight for their rights to cemetery land or house shares, they offered a higher-than-usual share of fengshui-related lawsuits, significant because fengshui manuals suggested a close link between female virtue, women’s health, and the fengshui of graves and houses. One is left to wonder whether the material realities surrounding legal practice drove knowledge about fengshui—or the other way around? What could have easily been a separate chapter feels condensed to a few pages: something to look forward to in another book, perhaps.
Literary scholars will undoubtedly find plenty of material for research and teaching. In addition to navigating legal texts and fengshui manuals, Brown incorporates sources from classical Chinese novels, including Hong loumeng, Sanguo yanyi, and Jinping mei. Brown uses these literary sources to illustrate how fengshui influenced real-world views and practices in the Qing era. As a scholar of Modern Chinese literature, I am curious how the themes of fengshui, yin-yang, and divination, prominently embodied in premodern literature, might adapt to contemporary and world literature. For instance, extending Brown’s analysis into the concept of fengtu (“local conditions and customs,” 風土), which merges landscape and cultural geography, could provide a richer framework for understanding how fengshui continues to influence modern literature’s depiction of urban and environmental themes. The concept of fengtu is relevant because it helps us see how traditional ideas about the natural world and human interactions with it are woven into contemporary stories.
Laws of the Land is a gripping, overdue study: enlightening, challenging, and utterly inspiring. Despite being an ethnically Manchu Chinese citizen with lineage tracing back to the Bordered Yellow Banner of the Qing dynasty, I am not deeply familiar with Qing governance and traditions, a situation ameliorated by Brown’s book. Brown brilliantly applies his knowledge of Chinese cosmology, philosophy, history, and literature to use fengshui as a seed to uncover profound insights into the past, illuminating a story that once seemed all too hard to see.
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