What is China's ancient geomantic theory?

After thousands of years of continuous development, China traditional architectural culture has formed a system with rich connotations, brilliant achievements and unique style. Compared with the background of world architectural culture, an extremely remarkable feature of China's traditional architectural culture is that all kinds of architectural activities, whether cities, villages, settlements, palaces, gardens, temples, tombs, roads and bridges, are hardly influenced by the so-called geomantic theory in site selection, planning, design and construction. However, since modern times, especially since the May 4th Movement, most of China's academic research has been organized and studied with the help of western learning methods. For a long time, traditional academic research that conflicted with western science and technology at that time was often despised or even dismissed as feudal superstition. For example, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) was once dismissed as a witch doctor by western scholars because of its different theories, such as yin and yang, five elements, dirty as febrile diseases, qi, pulse and meridians. From Beiyang government to Kuomintang government, Chinese medicine has been repeatedly banned. Traditional geomantic omen, especially popular folk geomantic omen, attaches great importance to the theory of five elements, which is full of nonsense and taboos, and is especially superstitious. Therefore, in academic circles, it has almost always been regarded as the dross of traditional culture, despised and abandoned by people. In the study of the history of ancient architecture in China, until recently, there has never been any in-depth exploration in this field, so that the origin, evolution, purpose, connotation of Feng Shui theory and its influence and value on the practice and theory of ancient architecture in China have become undisclosed academic gaps.

On the other hand, in recent decades, the research on the history of ancient architecture in China has made great progress and remarkable achievements in many aspects, but there are also obvious gaps and gaps. Apart from architecture and landscape architecture, China's ancient architectural aesthetics, design ideas, theories and methods have always lacked in-depth and systematic theoretical revelation. For example, China ancient architecture has great artistic attainments and achievements in the overall treatment of the spatial environment, including the organic combination of human landscape and natural landscape, and the spatial layout organization of large buildings, which are completely different from ancient and modern western architecture. But is there any theoretical guidance for this practical achievement? There are many questions. Some scholars believe that this is due to the premature standardization method of ancient building construction in China, which makes the design and construction have a clear division of labor and greatly simplifies the design of single buildings. Therefore, ancient architectural design can pay attention to the overall organization of space. With the inheritance from generation to generation, it has accumulated rich practical experience. Therefore, with a keen and accurate sense of scale and skillful handling skills of space art, it can flexibly and appropriately use various architectural shapes and organize buildings and spaces of various sizes in combination with the environment, including natural landscapes, to achieve high attainments. There are also some researchers who are not satisfied with this purely empirical explanation, and think that ancient philosophers in China are good at it, and they have devoted themselves to studying it, including philosophical and aesthetic theoretical thinking. However, in order to explore these theories, we can only learn from the western architectural theory and analyze, study and explain them with the help of China's ancient traditional painting theory, literature theory and gardening theory. Naturally, all these efforts can't be said to be meaningless, but in the final analysis, they can't eliminate such an unreasonable contradictory impression: China's ancient architectural practice has made great achievements in the artistic treatment of natural and human environmental landscapes and architectural groups, but it is blank in theory. People can't help wondering whether this theoretical blank is related to the academic blank of traditional geomantic omen theory research.