ABSTRACT
From earliest times, fortune telling has played an important role in Chinese history. One obvious difficulty in discussing Chinese divination in Western languages is the wide variety of possible translations for Chinese terms. Shang dynasty divination practices reveal patterns of conceptualization and categorization that lasted for several millennia in China – for example, the early use of sexegenary cyclical characters for marking time. The interpretation of dreams has been a prominent feature of Chinese divination since the Shang dynasty, and by the Qing period it was highly refined in both theory and practice. A heightened attunement to physical forms and symbolic images, whether perceived in the sky, on earth, in writing or even in the shape of everyday objects, influenced many Chinese divination techniques, including geomancy, or “siting” – the art of selecting auspicious locations for tombs, houses, and other structures.
