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Fengshui in China Fengshui-Title-TOC Page Ii 29 August 2011 1:47 PM B ‘Required reading for scholars of Chinese religion’ R Unlike popular manuals, this book approaches fengshui from an uun academic angle, focusing on its significance in China, but also Fengshui depicting the recent history of its reinterpretation in the West. It includes a historical account of fengshui over the last 150 years with anthropological fieldwork on contemporary practices in two Fengshui in China in China Chinese rural areas. The author argues that fengshui serves as an alternative tradition of cosmological knowledge to explain a range geomantic Divination between state of everyday occurrences in rural areas such as disease, mental Orthodoxy and Popular Religion disorders, accidents and common mischief. Although Chinese authorities have opposed the tradition for centuries, it has been used by almost everyone as an aspect of popular cosmology. This paperback edition of the 2003 hardback introduces new material, responding to the evolving scholarly debate and reflecting changes in Chinese society, culture and beliefs. ‘This valuable study will be required reading for scholars of Chinese religion, and makes a valuable contribution to the anthropology of religion.’ – Joseph Bosco, ‘East Asia’ ‘[This book] offers significant insights into the working of diverse coexisting traditions ... [and will] undoubtedly remain an important work in the studies of contemporary China’s transformation as well as postcolonial cultural development.’ – Yinong Xu, ‘China Review International’ ‘Ole Bruun’s direct observations of fengshui … are the most detailed and extensive that have been made in these new conditions. He is well placed to say what fengshui has become in the dramatically changed circumstances of its homeland.’ – Stephan Feuchtwang Ole Bruun Foreword by s tephan Feuchtwang www.niaspress.dk Fengshui-pbk-cover.indd 1 29/08/2011 15:04 Fengshui-title-TOC Page i 29 August 2011 1:47 PM Fengshui in China Fengshui-title-TOC Page ii 29 August 2011 1:47 PM nias – nordic institute of asian studies Man & Nature in Asia series Series Editor: Arne Kalland, University of Oslo Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives Pamela J. asquith and arne Kalland (eds) Environmental Challenges in South-East Asia Victor T. King (ed.) State, Society and the Environment in South Asia stig Toft Madsen (ed.) Environmental Movements in Asia arne Kalland and Gerard Persoon (eds) Wildlife in Asia John Knight (ed) The Social Dynamics of Deforestation in the Philippines Gehard van den Top Co-management of Natural Resources in Asia Gerard Persoon, Diny van Est and Percy sajise (eds) Fengshui in China Ole Bruun Nature and Nation: Forests and Development in Peninsular Malaysia Jeya Kathirithamby-Wells NIAS Press is the autonomous publishing arm of NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, a research institute located at the University of Copenhagen. NIAS is partially funded by the governments of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden via the Nordic Council of Ministers, and works to encourage and support Asian studies in the Nordic countries. In so doing, NIAS has been publishing books since 1969, with more than two hundred titles produced in the past few years. UI N verS ty oF CoPeNhAgeN Nordic Council of Ministers Fengshui-title-TOC Page iii 29 August 2011 1:47 PM Fengshui in China g eomantic Divination between state Orthodoxy and Popular Religion O l e Br u u n Second revised edition with a foreword by Stephan Feuchtwang Fengshui-title-TOC Page iv 29 August 2011 1:47 PM nias – nordic institute of asian studies Man & nature in asia series, no. 8 First published in hardback in 2003 by nias Press simultaneously published in the United states by the University of Hawai‘i Press This revised paperback edition published in 2011 nias – nordic institute of asian studies Leifsgade 33, DK–2300 Copenhagen s, Denmark tel: (+45) 3532 9501 • fax: (+45) 3532 9549 E–mail: [email protected] • Website: www.niaspress.dk © Ole Bruun 2011 (2003) Publication of this book was assisted by the Danish state Research Council of the Humanities British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bruun, Ole Fengshui in China : geomantic divination between state orthodoxy and popular religion. - (Man and nature in asia ; no. 8) 1.Feng shui - China 2. Religion and state - China i.Title ii.nordic institute of asian studies 133.3’337’0951 isBn 978-87-91114-79-3 (hbk) isBn 978-87-91114-57-1 (pbk) Typesetting by nias Press Printed in the United Kingdom by Marston Digital Fengshui-title-TOC Page v 29 August 2011 1:47 PM Contents Foreword by Stephan Feuchtwang vii Acknowledgements xii Some Notes on Transliteration xiii A Retrospective View of the Book xv 1. Fengshui: a Challenge to anthropology 1 2. Fengshui Practices and Policies, 1850 to 1949 34 3. Fengshui Practices and Policies after 1949 81 4. The Fengshui Revival – Fieldwork in sichuan 112 5. another school of Fengshui – Fieldwork in Jiangsu 163 6. Fengshui applications and Possible interpretations 198 7. The Construction of a Discourse: Fengshui as Environmental Ethics 231 8. Conclusion 255 appendix: On the Origin of Fengshui and the History of its Literature 263 List of Chinese Terms 285 List of Chinese names 287 Bibliography 288 index 301 00/Prelims+Foreword Page vi Thursday, October 31, 2002 9:57 AM FIGURES 3.1: Illegal booklet of divination circulated in Sichuan 109 4.1: One of the few pre-liberation books on fengshui that survived the Red Guards’ book-burning 116 4.2: Mr. Luo in front of his house 123 4.3: Spreading ‘road money’ ahead of the funeral procession 140 4.4: Funeral procession, carrying a modern-style paper house for the deceased 141 4.5: Funeral procession – the urn 141 4.6: Mr Luo showing the landlord’s grave on his property 147 4.7: Road sign announcing the good fengshui of a public graveyard in a development zone 159 5.1: Traditional entrance adorned with powerful images 181 5.2: Seeing fengshui, although the circumference of the house is already indicated 183 5.3: Rural geomancer with compass and book 185 00/Prelims+Foreword Page vii Thursday, October 31, 2002 9:57 AM Foreword Fengshui has been globalised, but its centre of activities is still China. It is fashionable abroad because it is ‘complementary’, like acu- puncture: another Chinese body of knowledge and practice. As fashion, trickery or trustworthy truth, its practise in urban interior and garden design in the rich cities of Euro-America as well as China has been added to its traditional use for the siting of graves, homes, and public buildings. But it is important to treat it as a kind of knowledge, rather than as a phenomenon. Fengshui certainly stands the test of being so treated. It is substantial, has a long history, and can be shown to have affected the way Chinese people see and treat the world. One of the ways fengshui is known is through stories of the perfidy of its practitioners. But to ask what kind of knowledge it is and to what uses it has been put gets behind the immediate and practical questions of trust that anyone attracted to it as a client, in China as anywhere else, understandably asks. Others may go to China to learn the art and cosmology of fengshui in order to become practitioners. Ole Bruun did not. He is interested in fengshui as a kind of knowledge. So am I, and so probably are you, the reader. But there are many available ways of treating and understanding fengshui as knowledge. Fengshui has been studied by historians of science, by historians of religious cosmology, and by landscape architects. But for a closer emphasis on practice and social context, it is best done by anthropologists. My own study, which began nearly forty years ago, combined the exposition of Chinese texts with reports of fengshui in practice. But Ole Bruun concentrates on practice and has interviewed a great many fengshui specialists and their clients, something I did not do. Ole starts with the records of other Western observers as I did for the second half of my book but only after I had given an exposition of Chinese fengshui manuals1. He then adds his own much more systematic observations a century and a half later. The outsider is never neutral. It may be of some interest to compare the difference between the nineteenth-century observers vii 00/Prelims+Foreword Page viii Thursday, October 31, 2002 9:57 AM FENGSHUI IN CHINA and Ole Bruun as a late twentieth-century observer of fengshui in China because it is also an indication of changes that fengshui itself has undergone. The outside observers of the nineteenth century were missionaries and other representatives of great imperial powers. Ole Bruun is a different kind of outsider, in another time and kind of global economics and politics. He has less direct interest in China as a market or as a field for salvation or for any other mission than they had. He is a European who has used his knowledge of Chinese, years of experience in China and decades of studying it, to make of himself a well respected academic researcher. He is a professional exponent of different kinds of knowledge, how they are embedded in political and economic contexts and extended in social practices. True to this calling as an anthropologist, he describes how the politics of the immediate past, the years of Cultural Revolution, affected his field- work, and he has a very interesting take on the effect that his nine- teenth-century predecessors' quite different preoccupations in China had on the politics of fengshui. Fengshui was always proscribed, amongst other reasons because of the unfilial delay in the burial of ancestors that geomancers or geo- mantic dispute could cause.
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