Luan Tou (峦头)

The form school — reading a site by its physical shape and surroundings. Luan tou is the older of the two main branches: the reading of visible form. It looks at hills, watercourses, roads, building shapes and their relative positions, and it is the branch that gives the tradition its most concrete rules.

It belongs to the classical vocabulary of the tradition. The form school — reading a site by its physical shape and surroundings. The form school is the one branch whose rules survive translation into ordinary building practice, because most of them are statements about shelter, drainage and exposure.

The classical sources treat form as primary and calculation as secondary — the standard statement is that form must be sound before any formula is applied. The branch also supplies the animal and object names (dragon, tiger, phoenix, turtle) used to describe land shapes. It is grouped under Earth (土) in the five-element system.