This is a skillfully wrought study highlighting and probing the myriad intersections of popular fengshui beliefs, rituals, and practices with official Qing court procedures and deliberations; and with the environmental policies those courts fashioned, through their decisions, in pursuit of community justice and successful statecraft. Tristan Brown’s new monograph is based on maps and documents relating to more than five hundred court cases, along with numerous other legal papers, popular publications, and geomantic manuals drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from Sichuan’s Nanbu County Archive—a major collection which has already been very fruitfully mined by scholars seeking to shed light on different topics in Qing law and society.
Brown argues that “the key” to properly understanding the relationship of Qing law to fengshui lies in “disrupting” the customary dichotomy that classifies “law as rational and fengshui as irrational” (2). The reality, rather, was that a “sophisticated cosmology” was “assumed” by most people of the Qing, within which the state and its officials, families and lineages, economy and society at large, and the law were all embedded. When it was applied to land and land disputes, that assumed cosmology “manifested as fengshui.” Good, auspicious fengshui, it was generally recognized, could be employed for human benefit. Where it was believed to exist, it consequently merited protection. Accordingly, the Qing state recognized “harming fengshui” as “a crime.” And hence, when anxieties and disputes about land and its fengshui did arise within communities, people understood those as, potentially, matters for the courts. In proceeding, then, to take their concerns and their disputes to local officials and judges for resolution, people were explicitly acknowledging the government’s authority over the land and its best disposition. Brown, in this way, maintains that the law and fengshui cannot be rightly characterized as having been at odds, but are far better understood as having occupied “a shared nexus of principles that supported imperial governance and administration.” (5).
The documentary evidence for this fresh interpretation is laid out in chapters arranged topically. Chapter 1 deals with litigation pertaining to graves. Ancestral gravesites, generally speaking and insofar as possible, were selected and maintained by families and lineages with a view to their proximity to good fengshui—believed likely to benefit the fortunes of descendants. Chapter 2 discusses the painstaking lengths to which officials went in mapping fengshui in those lands that came before the courts. Clerks with special experience of mapping fengshui were sent out regularly to draw up detailed diagrams of lands under dispute, including on their diagrams any relevant buildings, bridges, or walls on those lands, as they stood in relation to fengshui markers such as mountains, groves of trees (especially ancient trees), temples, and water sources, and their proximity to “dragon veins” in the territory—those underground channels believed to conduct vital qi through the earth. Since “every county and prefectural yamen was required to hire one officer of the Yin-yang school to propagate and monitor correct practices related to astrology and geomancy across the empire” (127–28), geomantic experts were also on hand locally, and at the service of local officials, to doublecheck and verify the positioning of those potent elements of the “unseen” environment against those “seen” by the clerks and depicted on their maps.
Chapter 3 moves on to consider the angst-ridden matters of taking action to safeguard and, when possible, enhance good fengshui, in hopes that the sons of local gentry families preparing to sit the civil examinations might actually, against what were always very heavy odds, attain successful results. This chapter is full of interesting insights into the dynamics of community-level politics—or public affairs—in districts and counties, such as Nanbu, situated at the periphery of the empire. It should probably be read by every historian with an interest in the frequently delicate relationships that prevailed between local social elites and local state officials over the course of the Qing. Fengshui, Brown concludes, served as “a vehicle for members of the local elite to remonstrate with their government or protest some activity in terms that the state did not typically deem subversive.” By the same token, officials “needed the local public to see them considering those pleas” (111); they “needed to be receptive to popular opinion, or at least to the demands of local notables” (156), even though they did not always necessarily have to acquiesce to the particular preferences mooted by those members of the local elite. Fengshui “was never the subject of a question on the civil examinations,” Brown reminds us. “Yet it was often a key to success after a scholar took office” (155). And fengshui, on balance, was definitely “useful from the state’s point of view” because “it tied people to the land, ancestors, tax-paying family units, temple-based rural communities, the elusive dream of examination success, and, ultimately, the Qing state” (157).
Chapters 4 and 5 look, most perceptively, at discourses on fengshui and the law where, with industrialization in Sichuan through the nineteenth century, contentious matters of mining (for salt, lead, copper, gold, and coal, for example) and stone-quarrying were intensified. Here alarming new ways of “breaking fengshui”—by constructing noisy railroads, mammoth bridges, and baffling telegraph lines—all became local public issues. And here Brown explains how fengshui could sometimes work as a kind of “zoning” tool or rationale for county magistrates faced with questions about exactly where new infrastructure should or should not be allowed; as well as for officials needing to justify and demonstrate that state-endorsed modernizing and development projects were being “thoughtfully planned” (182). The imperial state remained reluctant to “move graves for compensation” as late as the 1890s (211). Yet, over the years, in what Brown refers to as “the landscape of resource management in Sichuan,” it was becoming increasingly clear that “a few things were true at the same time” (176). Some people invoked fengshui principles out of sincere concern for the environment, while others used it as “a way of extorting money” from would-be developers and investors. Since “geomantic extortion” had become “a serious issue in Sichuanese society” (184), investors increasingly started seeking formal guarantees from local officials that they would be protected from bullying intimidations and frivolous lawsuits organized by locals on the excuse of protecting fengshui. Throughout this work, Brown analyzes fengshui most persuasively as “a language of power” (45); one that officials “selectively engaged” (87), sometimes to protect people, and sometimes to project the state’s own power, through the courts.
This is not a book for beginners. It provides no general introduction to Chinese cosmological concepts, or even to fengshui, as such. Nor does it offer any handy overview of recent scholarly debates relating to Qing law into which this monograph fits. Selected chapters, however, might be offered as ‘suggested readings’ for bright undergraduates interested in nineteenth-century Qing encounters with Western science and industrial technology. More advanced students and scholars of late imperial China, on the other hand, are bound to find this study brimming with original insight into the malleable landscapes of power within which honest and not-so-honest social actors pursued their interests and advantages, whilst local officials struggled to govern with authenticity and authority.
Only one point need be mentioned as an item of regret after reading. And that is that Princeton University Press could not have done more to enlarge and enhance the many striking original illustrations—maps, diagrams, and drawings—that Tristan Brown has excavated and managed to copy from the archives. The good news is, nevertheless, that readers armed with sufficient patience and a powerful magnifying glass should, in the end, be able to make out most of the written characters and most of the other features recorded on these remarkable pictorial remnants—sketchy remnants, redolent of times and places in Sichuan where geomantic knowledge and legal knowledge could be blended together as effortlessly, and as expressively, as were the ink and the water that required to be mixed in making them.
