This post is based on a recent article published in the Asian Studies Review. The article can be read here and is currently available open access to all readers.
Across much of rural China, the cemetery is not a quiet margin of village life. It is a charged frontier where the living negotiate with the dead, where land becomes fate, and where security is imagined as something that can be cultivated, protected, and sometimes lost. Feng shui, in this setting, is not merely a vocabulary of tradition or a decorative cosmology. It is an everyday way of reasoning about vulnerability and continuity, a practical ethics of place through which villagers try to protect the lineage of the rural household against misfortune, disorder, and the shock of social change.
This study, published in full in the Asian Studies Review, examines cemetery feng shui across southern, central, and northern China, refusing the familiar tendency to treat feng shui as a southern story alone. What emerges from multi-sited fieldwork is not a single “feng shui culture,” but a set of regionally inflected practices shaped by vernacular belief systems, competing geomantic authorities, and localized negotiations with state policy and capital. The cemetery, in short, becomes a social form. Its spatial ordering materializes moral claims, power relations, and security imaginaries, and it does so differently across distinct rural configurations.
Rural security as a way of living
For smallholders, security is rarely abstract. It is the daily discipline of avoiding risk, protecting subsistence, and sustaining a sense that life will remain livable next season and recognizable across generations. This security-minded outlook does not simply compete with economic rationality; it often overrides it. In village worlds where livelihood is fragile and misfortune is interpreted as patterned rather than random, feng shui becomes one technique among many for making the future feel governable.
In the village life, security is not only material. It is also narrative and affective. It concerns the continuity of identity and belonging, the felt reliability of one’s social environment, and the endurance of the lineage as a moral and spatial unit. In this sense, cemetery feng shui is not merely about death. It is about keeping the living in place, in time, and in relation.
Qi, graves, and the moral unease of the dead
Feng shui is grounded in a vitalist ontology in which qi flows between landscape, bodies, and ancestral remains. Mountains, rivers, and soil are not neutral backdrops; they are living fields of force. Through the “resonance of qi,” villagers understand the land’s vitality as able to enter human life and extend across generations. Cemeteries, as yin dwellings, occupy a special position in this cosmology. The ethically regulated soul is imagined as anchored in domestic and lineage ritual spaces, but the corpse and bones, lodged in earth, are treated as powerful and potentially unruly. The dead, stripped of ordinary moral constraints, can drift into a ghostly unpredictability. Cemetery feng shui, then, becomes a spatial technique of containment and channeling that draws in sheng qi, disperses sha qi, and prevents the dead from spilling into daily life as disorder.
This is why, in many rural narratives, cemetery feng shui is believed to matter even more than residential feng shui. Houses shelter one generation. Graves, properly aligned, are said to shelter many.
Beyond “state versus society”: feng shui as hybrid order
Western scholarship has often treated feng shui either as a norm system guiding spatial practice, or as a constructivist repertoire activated differently across contexts. Two debates recur: whether feng shui is primarily an arena of state–society conflict, and whether it is moral, amoral, or something that dissolves the binary.
This study complicates both debates by treating feng shui as an entangled practice that is simultaneously cosmological and administrative. It can translate lineage obligations and security imaginaries into spatial forms that are sometimes legible to local governance, and sometimes resistant to it. It also shows that the moral question cannot be settled in advance. Feng shui becomes moral when it is tethered to lineage ethics and collective responsibility; it becomes ruthlessly competitive when it is mobilized as a weapon in disputes over land, influence, and security resources. Most often, it is both at once.
Three cemetery worlds: scattered graves, collective cemeteries, and public grids
Across the investigated regions, the study identifies distinct cemetery forms that reflect different social structures and rural–urban relations.
First, in many plains villages, graves are scattered among fields, paths, and houses. They appear beside vegetable gardens and along everyday routes, folding the yin dwelling into the ordinary landscape. This proximity does not always imply intimacy; it often signals a village order without a strong centralized authority capable of coordinating burial space. In these plains villages, cemetery space looks visually unplanned, yet it is socially saturated, with every grave functioning as a claim and every placement carrying the potential for dispute.
Second, in some mountainous and hilly areas, graves are also scattered, but they are pushed into forested slopes and distant ridgelines that villagers describe as a “sacred realm.” The cemetery becomes peripheral and difficult to access, separated by ravines and steep terrain. The distance, however, does not reduce the intensity of feng shui politics. It sometimes increases it, because the best sites are few and the terrain itself invites contestation.
Third, in single-surname villages with strong collective capacity, graves may be organized into a village collective cemetery. Here spatial order becomes overt. Graves follow terraced alignments and generational hierarchy, with founding ancestors elevated and future spaces reserved. The cemetery unfolds as a public narrative of lineage continuity, a genealogy written into earth and stone.
A different transformation appears in highly integrated suburban areas or places under funeral reform policy, where burial increasingly moves into public cemeteries—either state-run or market-operated. In these cemeteries, graves are arranged in grids, indexed as units in a standardized landscape. State-run cemeteries often embody a public rationality of uniform citizenship; market cemeteries display stratification through differentiated plots and prices. In both, the lineage logic of burial is muted, even when feng shui language is selectively adopted to secure compliance.
Everyday politics: three modes of feng shui negotiation
The heart of the paper lies in its account of how feng shui becomes politics, not through grand confrontation, but through everyday negotiations over space, legitimacy, and security.
In villages with scattered graves, burial decisions often unfold through private negotiation. Feng shui knowledge here is not standardized “textual feng shui”, but a contextual form of expertise, shaped by situation and experience, and often closely guarded. Villagers rely heavily on feng shui masters, and where multiple masters compete, disputes can resemble proxy wars between rival interpretations.
The study documents how conflicts arise not only from competing interests, but from the very nature of feng shui reasoning. A good site is rarely a neutral point. Its influence is imagined as radiating across surrounding land, shaping a zone of impact whose boundaries cannot be measured and therefore cannot be settled. This creates persistent ambiguity: how far must another grave be to avoid harming the “dragon veins”? Who has the right to claim a hill because an ancestor lies there? In such conditions, disputes can escalate into retaliation, with acts such as planting a tree to block sunlight, breaking branches and thrusting them into a tomb as symbolic injury, and mobilizing descendants to “defend the ancestors.” Mediation, when it arrives, often works not by disproving feng shui but by persuading the parties to accept a different interpretation, allowing retreat without dishonor.
In collective cemeteries, feng shui becomes coordinated through village-level ethics. The study’s Shandong case shows how a village leader mobilized collective resources to relocate scattered graves into a unified cemetery, transforming ditches into a lake and building an artificial mountain to realize an auspicious alignment. Here feng shui is re-described as a communal good: “no matter which household you belong to, when you see this, you feel reassured.” The cemetery becomes a governance resource, shaping reverence, humility, and collective coherence through inscriptions, soundscapes, and symbolic design. In this way, feng shui transforms into a vernacular form of rural administration, anchored in lineage ethics and collective funding.
In public cemeteries, feng shui is neither abolished nor fully respected. It is reallocated. Capital-driven cemeteries convert feng shui into purchasable differentiation, where better sites cost more and security itself is priced. State-run cemeteries aim to flatten difference, offering standardized burial as a form of civic order. Yet the state often frames relocation using feng shui language, promising ancestors a “better resting place”, to reconcile modernization projects with villagers’ security imaginaries. Feng shui’s interpretive flexibility becomes a policy resource.
What the Cemetery Leaves Behind
By moving across regions and cemetery forms, the study argues that feng shui in rural China functions as spatialized ethical reasoning: a way of making claims about what a lineage deserves, what a household must protect, and what counts as legitimate order in the landscape of the dead. It is neither simply moral nor simply instrumental. It is a contested medium through which moral authority, ritual legitimacy, and spatial rights are produced under conditions of demographic mobility, uneven urban integration, and changing governance.
The cemetery, then, is not only where the dead are placed. It is where rural life explains itself to itself through qi, through territory, through hierarchy, through compromise, and through conflict. In that sense, feng shui is not merely a belief about how space shapes fortune, but a lived and relational practice through which security is rendered thinkable, made shareable among kin and community, and exposed to contestation, allowing people to navigate a world in which the future is felt as something at once deeply intimate and persistently uncertain.
This post is based on a recent article published in the Asian Studies Review. The article can be read here and is currently available open access to all readers.
Image: Photo by Maximus Beaumont on Unsplash