Feng shui was reflected in the placement of public buildings. Rather than a random development, the city was laid out in a grid pattern on a north-south axis. North was positive, sacred, and traditionally as-sociated with the realm of the supportive ancestors and celestial divine. South was negative, potentially dangerous, and associated with malevolent spirits and threatening outsiders. East and west were the middle ground where the sacred and the secular intersected. Burial grounds, as in the case of the royal tombs, were placed outside of this orderly urban ritual, administraytive, and residential realm, because they contained the unpredictable spirits of the dead.