Hong Kong (19 page)

Not so long ago one of the hazards of driving in Hong Kong was the belief among elderly Chinese that if they stood close enough to a passing car any evil spirits at their heels would be run over. In 1960, when the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club suffered a series of calamities, including the death of a jockey, a Buddhist service of exorcism was held for four days and three nights upon the Happy Valley racecourse, led by sixty-eight monks and forty-eight nuns and attended it was reported by 40,000 citizens. The Ratings and Valuations Department, then housed in a former barracks, was also exorcised of ghosts left there since the Japanese occupation; the Press was given a preview of the ceremony. Three times a month childless women make their way to the phallic boulder called Yan Yuen Sek, up a track above Bowen Road in mid-Levels, where against a backdrop of plush apartment blocks, with the harbour beyond and the distant roar of traffic muffled through the trees, they light their joss-sticks, say their prayers and consult their fortunes in the lee of the monolith, which has probably been since neolithic times a symbol of fertility. The airy substances
which waver and float above the scene are sometimes fragments of burnt offering, and sometimes dragon-flies.

Hong Kong’s mountains and outlying islands are positively impregnated with holy thought and practice. If you fly over the New Territories in a helicopter you will discover that throughout the rough hill country are strewn the omega-shaped enclosures of ancestral graves, all alone in propitious sites, giving the whole massif a suggestion of sacred dedication. The island of Ap Chau is colloquially known as the Jesus island, since it is inhabited entirely by Chinese adherents of the True Jesus Church; hardly less holy is Lantau, convulsed though it is, as I write, by the building of Hong Kong’s enormous new airport on its ancillary islet of Chep Lak Kok.

That all too well-known temple of Po Lin is only one of a dozen retreats strewn across this large, bare and beautiful island, from red-roofed Buddhist monasteries in the flanks of mountain valleys to a rest camp for Christian missionaries high in the hills (the village of Tai O, on the western shore, was reported by the London Missionary Society in 1917 to be ‘a stronghold of idolatry’). Proud above the sea at the northern end of the island is the church of the Trappist Monastery, whose community came here from Communist China. Its thirty silent Chinese monks (together, in 1987, with one Englishman) run their estate as a dairy farm, and for years provided the Hilton Hotel with all its milk. A most homely smell of hay and cow-dung greets the visitor to their ugly buildings, together with the text
PAX INTRANTIBUS, SALUS EXUENTIBUS
– ‘Peace to those who enter, health to those who leave’.

And on a plateau in the south, reached only by footpaths, high and exquisitely lonely stands the Buddhist monastery of Tsz Hing. The clanging of its bells, the chanting of its monks at their devotions, float magically on the wind above the empty grassland all around.

Often the old Chinese traditions are formally institutionalized within the structure of this British colony. There are many Buddhist schools, there is a flourishing Confucianist academy, and the Chinese Temple Society administers most of the temples. The charitable body called Tung Wah, founded in the nineteenth century specifically to run a Chinese hospital, became almost a tribune of the people, and is now a complex agency of Chineseness. The Triads themselves are extremely
traditional: in the Sun Yee On Triad, for instance, senior officers have ritual names, like Dragon Heads or White Paper Fan, and a functionary called the Incense Master, straight from Manchu China, supervises the whole hocus-pocus of ritual, codes and cryptic signs.

In the New Territories especially ancient conventions are still formally honoured. Ancestral halls may be crumbling and rubbish-strewn, old architecture disappearing, but the heritage is far from abandoned. The native people of the New Territories are officially called indigenes, to distinguish them from immigrants to Hong Kong, and they have long memories. Some 6,000 clan organizations, officially recognized, own and administer ancestral or communal properties. At Tai O the village ferry is still run by the Kai Fong, the traditional residents’ association which used to provide the village watchmen too. On Cheung Chau tenants still pay rents to 400 members of the family which owned the island before the British came. The descendants of Lin Tao-yi, a thirteenth-century citizen of Kowloon, are paid a share of the moneys collected at the temple he built on Joss House Bay.

The walled village of Kat Hing Wai may have been degraded into self-display, but near Shatin another example, the Hakka village of Tsang Tai Uk, though run-down and hemmed in by urban development, is recognizably what it always was. Its name means Mansion of the Tsang Family, and it is more like a medieval castle than a village. Within its high square towered walls is a cheek-by-jowl, jam-packed assembly of four parallel brick alleys, very private of feeling, with a temple in the middle. It is strewn with the bicycles, potted plants, dogs, children and outdoor washing machines of domestic life, and seems to form one extended household to this day.

Further north, at the village of Wang Toi Shan, though a main road passes nearby and all the modern domestic conveniences are available, the Tangs still cling to their ancestral rights. They own 60 per cent of the village still, and each male has the legal right to build himself a new house there, perpetuating the clan’s hold over its fortunes. Its members live very traditionally, I learned from a Chinese-language television programme in 1986. They are buried as they always were, in ancestrally approved locations. They scorn to educate their daughters, who are expected to marry outside the village to avoid in-breeding, and so are regarded as merely temporary residents. They gamble incessantly, and the men share all the profits of the clan-owned lands. As a young Tang of Wang Toi Shan told the television interviewer, ‘We
don’t have to work here, we just have pleasure. Or we work for three years, rest for five.’

Chinese medicine, pithily summed up by a nineteenth-century British Medical Officer as ‘empiricism and quackery’, is practised assiduously still in Hong Kong. Many Chinese people distrust western cures and treatment, having far more faith in the efficacy of bear’s gall, weasel’s liver, and other old stalwarts of the Chinese pharmacopoeia. The herbalist’s shop is a common sight of Chinese Hong Kong. Its remedies are meticulously stacked in files and boxes, and the most precious of its specifics, like deer horn or Bezoar, which comes from the stomachs of ruminants, are laid out reverently in the window, sometimes in big glass caskets, sometimes on cushions of cotton wool.

Chinese mortuary practices survive, too. It is customary still to exhume the bones of the dead from their original graves and transfer them to urns; though now that bones decompose more slowly than they used to, I am told, under the influence of antibiotics, they are generally left in their graves for eight years, instead of the traditionally lucky six.

Then there is
feng shui
, wind and water, the geometry of place and balance. You can hardly
not
come across
feng shui
in Hong Kong. Its grasp upon the Chinese mind is tenacious, and the annals are full of its influences. James Hayes the historian has given us
¹⁴
a letter, written in 1961 to a District Officer, which he describes as a classic statement of
feng shui
fixation. Here it is:

Dr Hayes comments that ‘the geomantic quality of the land in question, the adverse effect of the interference with it, the remedy applied, the lawlessness of the offender, are all essential ingredients to a
feng shui
scenario’. Certainly in the past
feng shui
, with its undertones of magic and animism, has proved itself in the colonial context variously constructive and obstructive, comforting and terrifying, grand and petty. On the one hand whole villages were sometimes abandoned because the local
feng shui
had been disturbed, upsetting the cosmic balance, and European miners had to be imported to build the first railway tunnels because Chinese would not risk disturbing the earth-spirits; on the other hand
feng shui
gave to the countryside, in particular, a grace and proportion not entirely obliterated even now. Often it also had rapscallion perspectives. When a ship went ashore at Lantau in 1980 some of the islanders demanded compensation from the Marine Department on the grounds that its violation of the local
feng shui
had caused the otherwise inexplicable deaths of many chickens.

Even today no Hong Kong employer, from the richest bank to the simplest corner store, can afford to ignore the precepts of Wind and Water. Just as the wrong siting of an ancestral grave could affect the fortunes of descendants for ever after, so faulty design in factory or office can antagonize the earth-forces or the spirit world and bring bad luck upon all its workers. The doors of the Mandarin Hotel in Central were placed at an angle to the street to discourage the entry of inimical influences. The fifth chimney of the power station of Aberdeen is said to be there purely for safety’s sake – four chimneys would be unlucky because the Chinese word for four sounds like the word for death. A weeping willow was planted in the gardens of Government House to ward off the ‘secret arrows’ of the Bank of China towering nearby.
Feng shui
is inescapable in this British trading colony and financial centre: even the two-day tourist is likely to see, mysterious in the windows of antique shops, the dizzily complicated disks and rulers with which the geomancer practises his craft (guarding for instance against any conjunction of the measurement 43 with the measurement 5 ⅜, or making sure that the Five Elements, the Ten Stems and the Twelve Branches are auspiciously aligned).

I called once upon an eminent geomancer at his headquarters at Tsuen Wan in the New Territories. He also runs an electronic
manufacturing company, and his office was air-conditioned, and contained an aquarium full of extremely valuable carp. Wearing a brilliantly white shirt and striped tie, with a gold pen in his breast pocket, a gold watch and gold-rimmed spectacles, he made his points by tapping his cigarette lighter on his desk, and suggested to me a rather mature computer buff. In fact he was above all a devotee of
feng shui
. It was the first thing of his life, he told me, which he had learnt from an older master as all practitioners must.

True
feng shui
had nothing to do with magic, he said, although in the old China it used to be given an esoteric mystery by magicians in yellow robes. It was a matter of harmony between man and nature, and was concerned with location, with colour, with proportion. As he scribbled some illustrative diagrams in my notebook, and considered the question of whether
feng shui
was an art or a science (a philosophy, he rather thought), he told me that he was never short of geomantic business. Indeed his press cuttings showed him in an honoured place at the opening ceremonies of Hong Kong’s most spectacular new building, the headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, to the design of which he had contributed his expertise.

Actually that building, he said in a technical tone of voice, occupied one of the twenty best
feng shui
sites in the whole territory – with its back to mountains, beside flowing ridges, at the very bottom of one spur in a group of seven, on a gentle sloping site, facing the sea. Even so, he had felt obliged to make certain recommendations to improve the good fortune of the place, in particular adjusting the angles of the escalators.

The sophisticated assurance of such men, the unquestioning acceptance of their skills by highly educated Chinese, half-convinces many Europeans, too, that
feng shui
makes sense. As long ago as 1926 Sir Cecil Clementi, the Governor of the day, suggested that it might be regarded in some contexts as ‘at least an embryonic form of the town-planning idea’, and undeniably the
feng shui
woodlands planted by the ancients are ecologically valuable today. It is hard to know whether the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank people, when they agreed to shift the escalators, really believed it would be beneficial, or whether they simply wanted to keep their employees happy; but some expatriates certainly employ a geomancer to approve the siting, the architecture or even the furnishing of their new houses, ‘just in case’ – for they have caught from the Chinese the cheerful if fatalistic attitude that it is worth appeasing all gods, in case one of them exists.

If there was ever a time when the Chinese of Hong Kong were truly subject to the foreigner, it has long gone. Numerically so overwhelming, psychologically they have grown only stronger down the years. More than half of them, and that the younger and more virile half, have been born in Hong Kong, and as the British prepare to leave the place already one can sense them dismissing the whole business of colonialism from their minds. They are Chinese first, after all, to whom the existence of this Crown possession has been no more than a fortunate convenience. I dare say even the most virulently anti-Communist of them, the most sympathetic towards the west, feels a certain satisfaction at the thought of Hong Kong returning to its roots.