Fig. 5

With eight typical floor plans of Shui houses (from fieldwork and the literature), we analysed the spatial relationship of the two main types, which we evaluated from the spatial depth of their topological relationship. We found that the type-A floor plan had a tree structure with a ‘front-middle-back’ layout; the type-B floor plan had a symmetrical ‘left-middle-right’ layout (S2, source: Luo and Li 2016; S3, source: Lu 2004; S7 and S8, source: Yang 2018; others, source: the authors)