The Siting Ideas of Ming and Qing Imperial Tombs in China and its Geographic Measurement Models

Abstract

"Feng Shui", also known as geomancy, is a unique Chinese cultural landscape. The royal mausoleums of the Ming and Qing dynasties were selected and constructed in accordance with Feng Shui theories. With the help of modern geographic analysis methods and visualization techniques, utilizing historical data, DEM, water network, and remote sensing images to distill the abstract geomancy ideas into an easy-to-understand "Long", "Sha", "Shui", "Xue" and "Xiang", and transformed them into 8 indicators of geographic environment factors. Based on Bootstrap in MaxEnt model, we constructed a calculation model for the siting idea of the imperial tombs of Ming and Qing dynasties in China. The results show that the model has good applicability and can well characterize the siting idea of the imperial tombs of Ming and Qing dynasties in China. The altitude, ground roughness, slope direction, distance from the river network and water outlet are the main factors affecting the siting of the Ming and Qing tombs. In contrast, the peak point and the slope are very small influences. Moreover, this study also adopts the well-preserved Lu tomb, De tomb and Jingjiang Mausoleum to further verify the validity of the model, and the results show that most of the tombs of the 3 major Ming empire feudal kings are located in the areas with relatively high feng shui suitability. This study provides a new approach to the computation and expression of geomantic cultural site selection, which helps to better understand the ancient Chinese spirit of "unity of heaven and mankind".