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Hong Kong government spends millions on feng shui
Hong Kong has admitted to spending millions of pounds in order to rebalance the feng shui of its construction projects.
Photo: GETTY IMAGES
By Malcolm Moore, Shanghai 1:03PM GMT 16 Dec 2010
City officials have now promised to draw up strict guidelines on the practice after a campaign by the South China Morning Post forced them to admit that at least £6 million has been spent in recent years on compensating people living around construction projects for disturbing their feng shui.
Feng shui, a system of Chinese fortune-telling, has been used for centuries to orientate buildings in an auspicious manner, in order to help the flow of "qi", or vital energy. Some Hong Kong skyscrapers have holes in them to allow dragons to fly through.
Feng shui was banned in China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s but has made a dramatic revival in recent years, especially in the superstitious South.
In Hong Kong, anyone whose property is affected by a public construction project is entitled to claim compensation from the government for the damage to their qi. Typically, claimants ask the government to pay for a "tun fu" cleansing ritual, which involves a feng shui master performing rites around the site.
In recent years, rail lines, roads, bridges, tunnels and even telephone lines have been judged to offend feng shui and require cleansing.
The most notable recent offence was caused by a new express rail link between Hong Kong and Guangzhou, for which at least 17 feng shui compensation payments have been lodged.
The chief executive of the Kowloon Canton Railway Corporation, which is in charge of the project, admitted that while they had paid millions in compensation, no records had been kept, fuelling suspicions at the lack of transparency over the payments. "We have no access to the records. They have been properly disposed of," said James Blake to the South China Morning Post.
Since feng shui is a subjective art, critics have said the "cleansing rituals" amount to a shakedown, with feng shui masters and local landlords colluding to launch outrageous claims before splitting the proceeds.
After being pressed in the Hong Kong parliament on the subject, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said there would be improvements in "operational transparency" on the feng shui payments. However, she declined to launch an investigation into how much had already been spent.
"If you need us to be that detailed and retrieve details from so many previous construction works, we should consider if such a move is valuable and meaningful," she said.
Some Hong Kong feng shui consultants have become millionaires from the art, but the practice has also been riddled with fraud. One self-styled master, Tony Chan, managed to extract almost £60 million from Asia's richest woman, Nina Wang, before she died, but subsequently lost a battle to claim her £2 billion fortune, having been found to have faked her will.
