Feng shui

The name means wind-water. Practitioners work with qi, described as a force that gathers or disperses depending on how a place is laid out, and the aim is to site and orient things so that it gathers. The compass school reads directions off a luopan, the ring-covered feng shui compass, while the form school reads the shape of the land itself. Feng shui has no scientific standing and is best described as a long-running practice rather than a technique with measurable effects.

Numbers enter through the Lo Shu, a three-by-three magic square holding 1 to 9 with every row, column and diagonal summing to 15. Each cell is tied to a compass direction and to one of the eight trigrams. The flying-star method, xuan kong fei xing, moves those nine numbers through the grid on a schedule of years and months, and a consultant reads which number has landed on which sector to judge the period a building is in.

Running alongside all of this, and often confused with it, is the ordinary preference for auspicious digits: 8 for prosperity, avoidance of 4. That belief comes from how the words sound in Chinese rather than from the Lo Shu or the trigrams, so a feng shui consultation and a lucky phone number are two separate customs that happen to share a market. Property listings and lift panels reflect the second far more visibly than the first.