My first direct encounter with feng-shui came soon after I arrived in Hong Kong in 1965. A new hospital was being built on a hill overlooking Castle Peak Bay, where my family and I lived. The hospital foundations cut deep into the slope. Several old peasants told me, “This is very bad; the construction has cut the dragon’s pulse.” I learned that the hill had a dragon in it, whose blood circulation had been cut by the foundation trench. This seemed strange to me. I noted it down as a fascinating local belief, and thought no more of it. Soon afterward, a typhoon dumped two feet of rain on Hong Kong within a few days. The oversteepened, undercut slope failed, and a torrent of mud descended, washing out the hospital foundations and burying a house or two at the hill foot. “See?” said my friends. “This is what happens when you cut the dragon’s pulse.” A light went on in my head. The Chinese peasants, pragmatic to the core, had described the phenomenon in terms strange to me; but the phenomenon they described was perfectly real. I reflected that the geologists’ terms “oversteepening” and “slope failure” were not much more empirically verifiable than the dragon. Any Chinese peasant would find them even stranger than I had found that eminent serpent, since I had already learned from reading that ancient Chinese saw dragons in the scaly, ridged contours of mountain ranges. As time went on, I learned that I had found more than a different way of talking about obvious facts. Chinese site planning seemed more and more rational. I learned that villages protected the groves of trees that ringed them, because trees attract good influences and also provide shade, firewood, fruit, leafmold, timber, and other goods. I learned that roads to villages were made crooked to discourage evil beings—and that the evil beings included not only demons but also soldiers, government officials, and (other) bandits.
Assessing the annual risk of vehicles being hit by a rainfall-induced landslide: a case study on Kennedy Road in Wan Chai, Hong Kong