Fenjin Point-Siting

Fenjin point-siting is a craft that can be verified. Compass, sand-and-water, orientation, strata, wind-gaps, magnetic declination, the firing date of the tomb brick, the ancient characters on the stone carvings — you work down the list one item at a time before you can say where a tomb's true vault lies. A man who knows fenjin reads terrain, reads breath-vents, reads the run of the rock layers; the whole business of auspicious and inauspicious spirits never enters his ledger. Site the vault right and you go in alive and come out alive; site it wrong and at best the roof comes down, at worst something gets you.

The needle readings take the most work. The Shen family grades them finely: a faint tremor of 1 to 2 degrees is the earth-vein breathing, ordinary; 5 degrees is called the still deflection, the breath-vent half-shut; 15 degrees is the great deflection, and by then the man is standing inside the breath-vent. Above that the Fragment carries no record left by anyone before. The compass is the old kind, ringed scales with the heaven-pool at the center, and the gilt along the rim has been worn into a clockwise arc by several generations of thumbs, the brightest stretch falling exactly where the thumb presses the plate.

Judging where a tomb came from usually does not start with the tomb. The Fenjin rhymes list the four on-site signs: the shrine faces backward, the stele bears no characters, earth breeds damp, the breath-vent half-shut. A village shrine that sits east and faces west is nine times out of ten a ward set down on a breath-vent, and even the retiling of such a shrine follows rules — new tiles go along both sides of the ridge, never on the two lowest courses of the drainage curve. Where the face of a stele has been ground flat, you have to drop the lamp almost to the ground and rake the light across it before the remaining strokes float up. Stone that seeps water on its own, that leaves a small damp patch under the pad of a finger and takes 3 seconds to dry, is earth breeding damp. All four together, and there is something underneath.

The name for it changes from place to place. The old hands in Guanzhong call the craft reading the breath, the Lianghu country calls it treading the ground, and the runners in Guangdong just call it measuring the mountain. Different houses, different rhymes, and still seven or eight parts in ten of the procedure line up — measure first, then dig, then reason it out.

The Fenjin school has an old saying:

Being able to see the vault does not mean being able to read what is inside it.

Some tombs are a disaster precisely because you sited them right.