《Laws of the Land》简介：

Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912).

Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines.

Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.

《Laws of the Land》摘录：

This book concerns the roles of fengshui in law during the Qing (1644– 1912), the last of China’s imperial dynasties. Literally wind ( feng) and water (shui), fengshui refers to the practice of analyzing landscapes to determine the most auspicious sites and orientations for houses, graves, temples, and other kinds of structures, based on principles of harmony between humans and their environments. Fengshui has long been misunderstood in the West. Early Western observers dismissed it as superstition, while New Age practitioners enthusiastically adopted it for interior design and home decoration. Scholarly publications have shed much light on fengshui’s theories yet have tended to focus on its applications in city planning, architecture, and aesthetics. From today’s stand point, the law cour...

《Laws of the Land》目录：

Acknowledgements ix
Dates of Qing Era Names xv
Weights, Measures, and Exchange Rates xvii
Qing Administrative Units for the Interior Lands (“China”) xix
Conventions in the Text xxi

Introduction 1
1 Litigating Graves 20
2 Mapping Fengshui 61
3 Examining Fortune 108
4 Mining Sichuan 158
5 Breaking the Land 193
Concluding Remarks 223
Appendices 231
List of Chinese Terms 237
Notes 241
Bibliography 285
Index 315
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