This project investigated how local constructions of the “national fengshui master” (guoshi 國師) reshaped geomantic discourse in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) in ways that reinforced the imperial model of centralized authority. Before the fourteenth century, guoshi primarily referred to Buddhist and Daoist court preceptors. In Ming local writings, however, this image shifted away from religious figures toward authoritative masters of terrain-based fengshui, associated with the Luantou school of geographic physiognomy (luantoupai xiangdishu 巒頭派相地術). These figures were retrospectively linked to geomancers active in southern mountain communities between the ninth and eleventh centuries and increasingly portrayed as possessing court-recognized expertise. As this southern geomantic tradition circulated through state adoption, printed manuals, and itinerant teaching, earlier distinctions between court-based orientation methods and southern terrain-based practices were gradually blurred. Debates over geomantic legitimacy were redirected from technical differences toward questions of origin, lineage, and textual authority. Within this shifting epistemic landscape, the guoshi emerged in local narratives as a displaced or itinerant figure whose authority rested on imagined ties to court service and on claims of uninterrupted knowledge transmission through the family. Drawing on local gazetteers, genealogies, and geomantic manuals, the project demonstrates that the guoshi was not simply a projection of imperial authority into the past, but the outcome of complex local negotiations. Geomancer lineages mobilized transmission narratives to consolidate authority in an expanding knowledge market, while elite landholders invoked associations with national masters to anchor deep ancestral roots and enhance social prestige. By situating guoshi figures in earlier dynasties and promoting stories of court-trained masters, these actors sought to reassert hierarchy within an increasingly decentralized geomantic field—thereby inadvertently echoing the imperial logic of centralized order.