In Vastu Shastra the southeast belongs to Agni, fire, and the consequence is practical rather than decorative: the kitchen is placed in that corner, and where a plan cannot manage it the tradition offers the northwest as the second choice. Anything involving heat, from the hearth to, in modern adaptations of the rules, the electrical supply, is drawn toward the same quarter. The dikpala scheme that produces this places Indra in the east, Yama in the south, Nirriti in the southwest, Varuna in the west, Vayu in the northwest, Kubera in the north and Ishana in the northeast, with Agni holding the southeast between Indra and Yama.
The Chinese Later Heaven arrangement puts the trigram Xun in the southeast, whose attributes are wind and wood and whose season is the turn from late spring into early summer. Xun belongs to the Wood phase, not to Fire, so on this bearing the two systems assign incompatible elements. Neither is wrong within its own scheme, and the disagreement is a reminder that these are separate cosmologies rather than regional dialects of one.
The Greek wind rose named this quarter for Eurus, and the Tower of the Winds in Athens carries a figure for it among its eight sides. That building is the clearest surviving evidence that an eight-point division of the horizon, complete with personified quarters, was in use in the Mediterranean well before the medieval compass rose reached the same number by a different route.