feng-shui some of its ancient respectability. But they have not reduced its popularity, and there is a growing number of people in Asia today who, on the advice of feng-shui experts, propitiate fate by changing their furniture arrangement, the colour of their office walls or the shape of their front doors. Even the earnest British directors of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, when they decided to build their big new head office in Hong Kong, turned to one of the best-known experts in the colony to avoid trouble with the feng-shui. During the planning of that futuristic steel and glass edifice the architect, Norman Foster, was constantly in touch with this ‘master of the forces of nature’, taking note of what he said and following his recommendations. These determined a great number of architectural details, including the strange diagonal placement of the entrance stairway.
After building the bank, Foster helped to plan the new Hong Kong airport (in the shape of a dragon!). But people in certain areas of his office were continually falling ill. So the feng-shui expert was called in. He studied the problem, and concluded that the demolition of some old houses in the area had left a gap through which ‘evil spirits’ flew in a direct line to strike the building. For the people working there it was like having a knife constantly plunged in their chests. His advice was to move all the desks, to curtain the windows and to place mirrors to deflect the spirits. Absurd? Perhaps, but once all this was done there were no further complaints from the staff.
Obviously, the ‘successes’ of feng-shui, as of any magic practice, are partly explained by an element of autosuggestion: if people firmly believe that something can help them, it may indeed do so. The typical case is that of a couple, childless for years, who manage to conceive after following the advice of the feng-shui man to change the position of their marital bed.
What is interesting about feng-shui, despite its facade of magic, is its basic principle: the constant re-establishment of harmony with nature. For the Chinese everything has to be in equilibrium. Illnesses, misfortunes, sterility or bad luck result from the rupture of some harmony, and the function of feng-shui is to restore it. Ecologists ante litteram, the Chinese. They knew nature well. They knew nothing else!
The Chinese have never been metaphysicians, they have never believed in a transcendent god. For them nature is all, and it is from nature that they have drawn their knowledge and their beliefs. Even their writing, made up of images, is based on nature and not on some abstract convention like our alphabet. In any European language it would be possible to agree that from now on the word ‘fish’ means horse and the word ‘horse’ means fish. But in Chinese such a thing would be inconceivable, because the character used to write fish is a fish, and the character for horse is a horse.
Western man sees God as the creator of nature, and for centuries has distinguished between the natural world and the world of the divine. But for the Chinese the two are indistinguishable. God and nature are the same thing. Divination is thus a sort of religion, and the fortune-teller is also a theologian and priest. That is why, until the advent of Communism, superstition was never repressed in China as it was in the West, where it was seen as the antithesis of religion and has always been vigorously suppressed. The Chinese – like almost all Asians – have never worried about this distinction between religion and superstition, just as they have never posed the problem – also typically Western – of defining what is and is not science. For centuries the Chinese have practised astrology, for example, without ever wondering if its bases were ‘scientific’. In their eyes it worked, and that was enough.
Chinese astrology is based on the lunar calendar. A year consists of twelve new moons to which, every twelve years, a thirteenth is added. Twelve years make a cycle. Each year is characterized by an animal: the rat, the ox, the tiger, the cat, the dragon, the snake, the horse, the goat, the monkey, the rooster, the dog, the pig. The first day of the year is the day of the first moon and the year always begins in January or February.
The animal of the year of one’s birth has an enormous influence on one’s personality and destiny: people born in the year of the rat, for example, must take care all their lives not to fall into traps; those born in the year of the cat will always land on their feet; those born under the sign of the rooster must always scratch the earth to feed themselves. Women born in the year of the horse are indomitable and therefore difficult wives. Those born in the combination of the horse with fire – which happens every sixty years – are wild, dangerous and practically impossible to marry. 1966 was one of those years, and in Asia many women who found themselves pregnant resorted to abortions to avoid bringing into the world daughters who would not, in all probability, find husbands. In Taiwan in 1966 the birth rate fell by 25 per cent for this reason.
On the other hand, males born in the year of the dragon are destined to be strong, intelligent and fortunate. As 1988 was such a year, coupled with the fact that the Chinese consider the double 8 to be a symbol of double happiness, many couples tried to have sons then. To render the child even more fortunate, many mothers tried to give birth on the eighth day of the eighth month of that year: all the maternity beds in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong were booked up by women prepared to undergo Caesarean sections to bring their children into the world on that ultra-auspicious day – 8 August 1988.
One of the most important factors determining a person’s destiny is the exact hour of his birth. Only by knowing that hour can the astrologer draw his horoscope, identify his character, describe the important stages of his life and even foresee the eventual date of his death. To know the hour of someone’s birth is to possess a weapon against him; therefore many politicians in Asia keep their birth-hour secret, or give a false one.
Everyone knows that Deng Xiaoping was born on 22 August 1904 (the year of the dragon!), but the exact hour remains one of China’s great secrets. Mao Tse-Tung and Chou Enlai were less successful. In the 1920s both of them, then living in Shanghai, went – as a joke, or because they believed in it, who knows? – to see the most famous astrologer of the city, a certain Yuan Shu Shuan. When the nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949, among the piles of documents they took with them were the horoscopes that Master Yuan had carefully preserved of all his clients. Those of people who had since become famous were published. In 1962 a Taiwanese astrologer predicted, on the basis of the birth times given to Yuan, that both Mao and Chou would die in the same year, 1976. And indeed they did.
Innumerable political decisions in Asia are based on astrology, and therefore the secret services of various countries employ experts to predict what their adversaries’ astrologers may advise in certain situations. It is known that the Vietnamese, the Indians, the South Koreans and the Chinese have astrology sections in their counter-espionage agencies. Even the British have one, based in Hong Kong, to keep track of what the Chinese are doing in the sphere of the occult. Increasingly, it seems, all sorts of old practices, banned during forty years of Communism, have now resurfaced to flourish not only among the people, but among the Communist rulers themselves.
In 1990, a few days before the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, a strange thing happened. A group of workers erected a large ring of scaffolding around the flagpole in the centre of the square and started working inside it. When the scaffolding was removed, the height of the pole had been increased by a few yards, and the red flag, symbol of China, flew higher than it had ever done since 1949. Apparently a great feng-shui expert had suggested to Deng Xiaoping that this would restore the harmony of the square and thus the good fortune of the People’s Republic.
I began collecting stories like these because I planned to write an article on the importance of superstition in Asia, but I also wanted to dispel my doubts and to convince myself that I was right to change my life for a reason that had absolutely nothing rational about it. But was that not true of much of the life around me? Especially in Thailand, I had only to use my eyes.
In Thailand it is common for important political declarations to be made on days considered auspicious, and for politicians to reassure public opinion about the state of the economy or national security by quoting
