Long before it became an interior design trend, feng shui began around 4000 BC with the Yangshao and Hongshan cultures of ancient China, who relied on naked eye astronomy. At Banpo, dwelling doors were aligned to the Yingshi star cluster just after the winter solstice, catching the lowest sun for warmth, and a grave at Puyang holds clam shell mosaics of the dragon and tiger star clusters and the Big Dipper on a north-south axis. By the third century BC, Liuren astrolabes with a square earth base and round heaven disk set true north, and after the discovery of the spoon-shaped lodestone those markings moved onto the luopan compass. From the Han through the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Imperial Astronomical Bureau sited capitals and tombs, and builders raised the artificial Jingshan Hill behind the Forbidden City to serve as its protective black tortoise.

Feng shui also worked from the bottom up. Villages in southern China used it to manage shared land, placing graves on high untillable hills away from water and farmland, while masters mediated disputes as neutral parties. In the 1950s, villagers stalled Hong Kong’s Shek Pik Reservoir by claiming it would sever the dragon’s pulse, and during the Boxer Rebellion rural people tore down foreign railways and telegraph lines. After 1949 it was branded feudal superstition and targeted as one of the Four Olds, yet it returned with economic reform, reaching Hong Kong Disneyland and officials in Gansu province.

• How the five phases of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water work as processes of creation and destruction rather than substances
• Why the form branch’s white tiger and black tortoise describe real features like high ground that blocks winter wind and floods
• Disney Imagineering shifting the main gate of Hong Kong Disneyland by 12 degrees in 2005 on a master’s advice
• Gansu county officials spending over $700,000 of public funds to move a 369 ton spirit rock
• The 1996 Ozone Disco fire in the Philippines, where inward swinging doors meant to keep money in trapped a crowd and 162 people died