
Feng Shui
A Victorian Sinology Treatise on Chinese Geomancy, Cosmology, Landscape Divination, Burial Customs, and Earth Energies
Ernest J. Eitel(Author)
e-artnow (Publisher)
Published on 24. May 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
40 pages
978-80-273-8643-7 (ISBN)
Description
Ernest J. Eitel's Feng Shui, first published in the nineteenth century as Feng-shui; or, The Rudiments of Natural Science in China, is a pioneering English-language exposition of Chinese geomancy. The book explains the cosmological principles by which landscape, orientation, wind, water, ancestral burial, and domestic siting were interpreted as forces shaping human fortune. Written in a concise, analytical, and occasionally polemical Victorian prose, it belongs to the early sinological literature that sought to translate Chinese metaphysics into categories intelligible to European science and theology. Eitel was a German Protestant missionary, linguist, and colonial educator who spent many years in China and Hong Kong. His command of Chinese texts and daily contact with local customs enabled him to observe feng shui not merely as superstition, but as a coherent system embedded in classical learning, social practice, and popular religion. His missionary background also shaped his critical tone, giving the work both ethnographic value and ideological tension. This book is recommended to readers interested in Chinese intellectual history, comparative religion, anthropology, architecture, and the history of Western encounters with Asia. Though dated in assumptions, it remains an important document for understanding how feng shui was first interpreted for English-speaking audiences.
More details
Language
English
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 3 mm
Weight
75 gr
ISBN-13
978-80-273-8643-7 (9788027386437)
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Ernst Johann Eitel (1838 - 1908) was a German-born Protestant who became a notable missionary in China and civil servant in British Hong Kong, where he served as Inspector of Schools from 1879 to 1896.