Quotes of the Day

Hong Kongers, myself included, love to affect a certain expertise when it comes to feng shui. Because I am otherwise a materialist (as in believing only in physical matter, not as in bling), it has always been self-contradictory of me to discourse on the Chinese system of geomancy and the notion that the arrangement of landscape and objects affects well-being. At dinner parties, I can denounce mysticism — or yogic flying or reincarnation — as shrilly as any Red Guard, and declare that Christians ought to be deprived of the vote. But I'm also capable, at the evening's conclusion, of telling my hosts that their Arne Jacobsen chairs are blocking the chi in their green-dragon corner. The fact that I'm half-Chinese always seemed to make this O.K. Sure, feng shui was nonsense, but it wasn't the same sort of nonsense as transubstantiation or homeopathy. It was a superior Chinese nonsense, a righteous part of my fashionably ethnic, intangible heritage.

These days, though, I am cured of such intellectual malady. In fact, I am able to accuse feng shui's practitioners of contemptible quackery. Let me explain how I have arrived at this incontestable position.

The matter of Chinachem Charitable Foundation Ltd v. Chan Chun-chuen was heard at Hong Kong's Court of First Instance during the summer, and judgment is expected by year's end. The synopsis is this: upon the death, at 69, of billionairess 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, in supposedly propitious feng shui rituals, and that Wang had paid him at least $250 million for this and similar pieces of advice. Not content with such a spectacular windfall, the caddish Chan — the kind of parvenu, incidentally, who names his eldest son Wealthee — considers himself entitled the rest of her estate, even though he would be depriving a charity of its use, should he win control of it.

In 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."

The 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 of having sex with a 19-year-old girl on nine occasions by passing himself off as a feng shui master, telling her that their encounters were rituals designed to help her modeling career. You get the idea. Feng shui isn't merely unscientific. It's tawdry.

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 funnel the chi out of the air and into the interiors, where its course is further channeled by canals of furniture. The Hong Kong Tourism Board even promotes feng shui tours to visitors, and everywhere you turn, there's always some crackpot heiress, anxious taipan or socialite architect wanting to talk about dragon energy and phoenix fire. But I want to grab them all by the shoulders, shake them hard and tell them to get their noses out of the I Ching and to forget about those flying-star combinations. We've been fooling the occasional tourist, each other, and ourselves, for far too long.

• Liam Fitzpatrick
• In Hong Kong, the practice of feng shui has been cheapened to the point of absurdity