The Ancient Art of Feng Shui Feng Shui has been practiced in China for thousands of years and is believed to have started in 2953 B.C. when Hu of Hsia found a tortoise that had a perfect "magic square" on its back. From this discovery evolved the I Ching, the oldest book in Chinese history, and possibly the world (Webster 1). This book contains the first written instructions on the theory of Feng Shui. Feng Shui was seen as a sacred power, so much so that in ancient China, only the privileged class had access to the knowledge. There are even stories of members of the Imperial family who went out of their way to obscure the texts in order to prevent those who might be a threat to them from obtaining the sacred knowledge. The first Ming emperor even ordered that the country be flooded with books containing misleading theories and incorrect guidelines on Feng Shui (Too 2). When Chiang Kai Shek fled the mainland he took thousands of books on Feng Shui with him to Taiwan and used its principles in building a regime there. From there it traveled to Hong Kong and eventually to the Western World through Marco Polo (Cassidy). Modern Feng Shui is based on the commentaries from Wang Chi and other scholars from the Sung dynasty, 1126-960 B.C. (Webster 3). What is Feng Shui?Feng Shui is the ancient Chinese art of living in harmony with nature and your surroundings, in order to maximize your health, prosperity and luck. It literally translates as "wind and water" and it involves the placement of buildings in relation to their surroundings, and the placement of furniture within the building in order to maximize the ch’i, the original energy source on the earth, from which everything else was created (Webster 4). As the dragon is seen as the most revered celestial creature of Chinese philosophy, ch’i has been called the breath of the dragon. Ch’i is an invisible energy that circulates throughout the world but also gathers in cer...
