Recasting the National Fengshui Master: Local Knowledge, Textual Authority, and Centralized Order in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)

This talk investigates how local constructions of the “national fengshui master” (guoshi 國師) reshaped geomantic discourse in the Ming in ways that indirectly reinforced the imperial model of centralized control. Before the fourteenth century, guoshi referred primarily to Buddhist and Daoist court preceptors. In Ming local writings, however, the title was retrospectively applied to geomancers active between the ninth and eleventh centuries in southern mountain communities, recasting them as authoritative masters of terrain-based fengshui.

As this southern tradition circulated through state adoption, printed manuals, and itinerant teaching, earlier distinctions—formulated by Zhu Xi—between court orientation methods and the southern terrain tradition were blurred, redirecting debates toward questions of origin and textual authority. Amid this shifting epistemic structure, the guoshi emerged in local narratives as an exiled figure whose authority rested on an imagined link to court expertise and on claims of unbroken family transmission.

Drawing on local gazetteers, genealogies, and geomantic manuals, the article argues that the guoshiwas not simply a projection of imperial authority into the past but the outcome of a complex negotiation in which local actors —geomancers, landholders, and literati—mobilized textual traditions to define their position vis-à-vis the state. By situating the guoshi in earlier dynasties and promoting stories of court-trained masters, they sought to reestablish hierarchy within the geomantic field amid its increasing decentralization, thereby inadvertently echoing the imperial logic of centralized order.