Feng-shui: Ideology and Ecology

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.