Geomancy is the traditional art of divination in which mountains, water, soil and the seasonal winds are observed to choose the ground for a house or a tomb.
In the Western Han, kanyu had become the name of a field of divination, and the art of choosing houses and sites began to form a body of specialist knowledge.
The Book of Burial, attributed to Guo Pu of the Eastern Jin, put forward the sayings "ride the living breath" and "shelter from the wind and gain the water", and laid down the framework of feng shui theory. These ideas were used to choose building sites and to guard against disaster.
When the Forbidden City and the Ming Tombs were built in the Ming, the sites were fixed only after geomantic survey.
Geomancy is the class in the chapter on Sciences on the traditional art of choosing a site, in which mountains, water, soil and the seasonal winds are observed to choose the ground for a house or a tomb. It belongs to the traditional arts of divination and was already a named field by the Western Han, and later ages used it to choose building sites and to guard against disaster.
