The year of being water – a Chinese astrological reading of Hong Kong in a challenging hour
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I am neither a fortune-teller nor a feng shui expert. I’m just a civilian who takes a geeky interest in Chinese cosmology, its poetic possibilities and its understanding of the interconnection of all things. Much ink has been spilled on how Hong Kong should move forward, but perhaps it would be useful to start from the beginning and see the city through the prism of ba zi, the age-old practice of analysing the eight characters denoting a birth time.
In Chinese astrology, hours, days, months, years and even decades follow the zodiac cycle. Hong Kong was reborn as a special administrative region of China on July 1, 1997, a Wood Dragon day, which makes it a wood sign. More precisely, it is a tree growing in wet, fertile earth, and its birth chart is a picture of a thriving forest: trees, a little stream, soil, sparks, starlight, sunshine.
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But we need to talk about metal: an element that is virtually non-existent in Hong Kong’s chart, yet is making its presence felt in the city’s life. Metal symbolises structure. With regard to a tree, it is a controlling element that could take the form of an axe or shears; it could be a woodcutter or a gardener; it could be a boss.
Yet, the water in Hong Kong’s chart needs metal. Metal is the surface on which water forms, just as order becomes a support for liveability.
Here, Hong Kong faces a paradox. In the Chinese zodiac, the Monkey and the Rooster represent big and small metal objects like axe blades and shears, respectively. By the alchemical logic of Chinese cosmology, it is the Monkey, not the Rooster, that bonds with the Dragon and Rat in Hong Kong’s chart to form more water – more luck to feed into the city.
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Hong Kong has been in a Monkey luck cycle since 2009, but is moving into a Rooster decade next year. A gentler era might be just round the corner.
Foong Woei Wan is a production editor at the Post