Fact: Americans are proud that they have no sense of history.

For the average American, history is what happened last month. That is why so many websites and books have such inaccurate (and regularly fabricated) versions of the history of feng shui.

If you make the mistake of calling attention to the errors published about the history of feng shui, the perpetrators get angry and make excuses.

Any changes needed to make the text more truthful would take time away from taking your money. And frankly they don’t care about anything else.

American history is typically what the dominant culture thinks is history: white, Protestant settlers from Europe. Because the dominant culture is focused on their history, they have no idea of the history of other Americans. That makes it easy to mislead or misconstrue the early use of feng shui in America.

People with feng shui knowledge have been in the US since the early 1800s, according to documentary evidence. The history of “Chinatowns” all over the US attests to the presence of feng shui nearly everywhere that Chinese settled.

You just have to open your mind and look.

This Chinese fortune-teller appeared in Harper’s Weekly of December 28, 1878.

You can find this page, and more history, in the Library of Congress.