Word: shui
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...Read "Feng Shui for Fliers...
...Nina Wang Kung Yu-sum (a woman who wore her hair in pigtails, dressed like Lolita and answered to the nickname Little Sweetie), two conflicting wills were produced. One bequeathed her $4.2 billion estate to the Chinachem Charitable Foundation, run by her siblings. The other was flaunted by feng shui "master" Tony Chan Chun-chuen - who also claimed to be her lover - and stipulated that everything was to be left to him. It emerged in court that Chan had told Wang to bury large amounts of cash and precious stones at up to 80 secret sites around Hong Kong...
...court, Chan's professional tomfoolery (he once told a former legislator to burn nearly $2,000 a day "for luck") was thrown into sharp relief against the obscenity of his remuneration - so sharply that many Hong Kongers, including myself, were at last woken from the thrall in which feng shui had held us. Chan couldn't even produce a credible expert witness. Joseph Yu, the Ontario-based feng shui practitioner called as such, revealed that he was almost entirely self-taught, prompting Justice Johnson Lam to remark, "I think there is no need to cross-examine any further." (Watch TIME...
...public shaming of feng shui hasn't stopped at that. In October, the property developer Henderson Land was derided for assigning whimsical numbers to the top levels of a luxury apartment building in order to make them accord with local numerology, which holds that 6 and 8 are auspicious. Record prices were paid for so-called 68th-floor and 88th-floor duplexes when in reality they were on the 43rd and 44th floors and the 45th and 46th floors respectively. Shortly after, bloggers chortled and tabloids leered over the case of a 55-year-old bulldozer operator who was accused...
...These are, of course, impious assertions to make in a place with some of the most marvelous feng shui ever bestowed. Because its harbor is shaped like a carp - a fish symbolizing prosperity - Hong Kong is thought to be the font of enormous bounty. Sinuous dragons make their abodes in the hills, from which bracing floods of chi allegedly flow, accumulating in the sea in great reservoirs of bottomless luck. Many of the principal buildings famously adhere to feng shui principles - using the expensive realignment of an escalator here, or the positioning of a highly costed fountain there - to supposedly...