Study on Feng Shui (Geomantic) Suitability Evaluation of Mausoleums in Nanjing City Based on GIS

Abstract

Taking the mausoleums in the main urban area of Nanjing city as the study object, with the support of GIS technology, this paper extracts eight influencing factors (surface roughness, elevation, surface cutting depth, surface peaks, outfall, river system, slope, and aspect) corresponding to geomantic elements (“Long”, “Sha”, “Shui”, and “Xue”) in the geographical environments of mausoleums. The AHP is applied in the correlation weight method to calculate the weights of the eight influencing factors, while the information content method is applied in the grading method to calculate the numerical index of each factor. The feng shui (geomantic) suitability of the mausoleums in the main urban area of Nanjing is evaluated using the AHP-weighted information content method and by combining expert knowledge and experience with mathematical statistical techniques. According to the feng shui (geomantic) suitability evaluation results obtained for the mausoleums in the study area, the relatively low-suitability area accounts for 14.55% of the entire study area, the low-suitability area accounts for 25.40%, the suitable area accounts for 29.13%, the relatively high-suitability area accounts for 22.00%, and the high-suitability area accounts for 8.92%. Finally, through a sensitivity analysis of the model, a verification analysis applied using random mausoleums and a feng shui (geomantic) analysis of the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, the feng shui (geomantic) suitability evaluation results obtained for the mausoleums analyzed herein are found to be consistent with the actual distribution of the mausoleum sites. The research shows that the AHP-weighted information method based on GIS is suitable for evaluating the feng shui (geomantic) suitability of mausoleums.

Migration and Land Exploitation from Yuan to Qing Dynasties: Insights from 252 Traditional Villages in Hunan, China

“…The data management and analysis tools of ArcGIS provide geographic information data for various types of research and are an intuitive and effective method for preserving cultural heritage [40][41][42][43]. Researchers such as Ryavec (2015), , and other related scholars used a combination of data and historical geographic information to restore ancient Feng Shui, villages, or urban scenes [44,45]. Sprague (2013) used ArcGIS to conduct multiple buffer analyses of rural Japanese landscapes depicted in historical maps surveyed in the 1880s to investigate the spatial patterns on the Kanto Plain near Tokyo during the period of traditional agriculture [46].…”