What Am I Doing Here? (7 page)

The afternoon was overcast and a sharp wind was blowing off the harbour. We rode the escalator to the first floor, and took shelter in the Cash Department. It was like entering a war-machine: the uniform grey, the absence of ‘art', the low hum of computerised activity. It was also cold. Had the building been put up in Soviet Russia there would at least have been a touch of red.

Behind a gleaming black counter sat the tellers – unscreened and unprotected, since, in the event of a bank-raid, a kind of portcullis slices sideways into action, and traps the raiders inside. A few potted palms were positioned here and there, apparently at random.

I sat down on a slab of black marble which, in less austere surroundings, might have been called a banquette. Mr Lung was not a tall man. He stood.

Obviously, the surroundings were too austere for many of the Bank's personnel, and already – in the executive suites on high - they had unrolled the Persian carpets, and secretaries sat perched on reproduction Chippendale chairs.

‘This', Mr Lung began, in a proprietorial tone, ‘is one of the Top Ten Buildings of the World. Its construction is particularly ingenious.'

‘It is,' I nodded, glancing up at the cylindrical pylons and the colossal X-shaped cross-braces that keep the structure rigid.

‘So first,' he continued, ‘I would like to emphasise its good points. As far as
feng-shui
is concerned, the situation is perfect. It is, in fact, the best situation in the whole of Hong Kong.'

Feng-shui
means ‘wind-and-water'. From the most ancient times the Chinese have believed that the Earth is a mirror of the Heavens, and that both are living sentient beings shot through and through with currents of energy – some positive, some negative – like the messages that course through our own central nervous systems.

The positive currents – those carrying good ‘
chih
,' or ‘life force' – are known as ‘dragon-lines'. They are thought to follow the flow of underground water, and the direction of magnetic fields beneath the Earth's surface.

The business of a geomancer is to make certain, with the help of a magnetic compass, that a building, a room, a grave or a marriage-bed is aligned to one or other of the ‘dragon-lines' and shielded from dangerous cross-currents. Without clearance from a
feng-shui
expert, even the most ‘westernised' Chinese businessman is apt to get the jitters, to say nothing of his junior staff.

At a lunch I happened to tell an ‘old China hand', an Englishman, that the Bank had taken the advice of a geomancer.

‘Yes,' he replied. ‘It's the kind of thing
they
would believe in.'

Yet we all feel that some houses are ‘happy' and others have a ‘nasty atmosphere'. Only the Chinese have come up with cogent reasons why this should be so. Whoever presumes to mock
feng-shui
as a superstitious anachronism should recall its vital contribution to the making of the Chinese landscape, in which houses, temples and cities were always sited in harmony with trees and hills and water.

Perhaps one can go a step further? Perhaps the
rootedness
of Chinese civilisation; the Chinese sense of belonging to the Earth; their capacity to live without friction in colossal numbers – have all, in the long run, resulted from their adherence to the principles of
feng-shui
?

‘Now it so happens,' Mr Lung said, ‘that no less than five “dragon-lines” run down from The Peak and converge on the Central Business District of Hong Kong.'

We looked across the atrium of glass, towards the skyscrapers of the most expensive patch of real estate in the world.

Some of the lines, he went on - not by any means all – were punctuated here and there with ‘dragon-points' or ‘energy-centres', like the meridian-points known to acupuncturists: points at which a particularly potent source of
chih
was known to gush to the surface.

‘And the site on which the bank stands', he added, ‘is one of them. It is, in fact, the only “dragon-point” on the entire length of the line.'

Other lines, too, were known to have branches, like taproots, which tended to siphon off the flow of
chih
, and diminish its force.

‘But this line', he said, ‘has no branches.'

Yet another favourable point was the bank's uninterrupted view of the mountain. Had there been naked rocks or screes, they might have reflected bad
chih
into the building.

‘But The Peak', he said solemnly, ‘is covered in trees.'

Similarly, because the new building was set well back from the waterfront – and because the sun's course passed to landward – no malign glitter could rise up from the sea.

Mr Lung liked the grey colour which, he felt, was soothing to the nerves. He also liked the fact that the building absorbed light, and did not reflect glare onto its neighbours.

I questioned him carefully on the subject of reflected glare, and discovered that glass-curtain-wall buildings which mirror one another – as they do in every American city, and now in Hong Kong – are, from a
feng-shui
point of view, disastrous.

‘If you reflect bad
chih
onto your neighbours,' Mr Lung said, ‘you cannot prosper either.'

He also approved of the two bronze lions that used to guard the entrance of the earlier building. During the War, he said, the Japanese had tried to melt them down:

‘But they were not successful.'

I said there were similar lions in London, outside the Bank of England.

‘They cannot be as good as these two,' he answered sharply: so sharply, in fact, that I forgot to ask whether the lions had been put away in storage three years ago, when Mrs Thatcher made her first, ill-informed foray into Chinese politics - and gave the Hong Kong Stock Exchange its major nervous breakdown.

The result, of course, was the historic slap from Deng Xiaoping himself.

‘So what about the bad points?' I asked Mr Lung.

‘I'm coming to them now,' he said.

The Hong Kong waterfront was built on reclaimed land and there were stories . . . No. He could not confirm them but there were, nevertheless, stories . . . of sea-monsters and other local ghouls, who resented being dumped upon and might want to steal into the building.

This was why he had recommended that the escalator to the first floor – which was, after all, the main public entrance – should be so angled, obliquely, that it ran along a ‘dragonline'. The flow of positive
chih
would thus drive the demons back where they belonged.

Furthermore, since all good
chih
came from the landward, he had advised that the Board Room and Chief Executive offices should turn away from the sea: away, that is, from the view of Kowloon and the mountains of China; away from the cargo-ships, tugboats, ferries, drifters, coaling-barges, junks; away from the White Ensign, Red Ensign and that ‘other' red flag – and turn instead to face the ‘Earth Spirit' descending from The Peak.

The same, equally, applied to the underground Safe Deposit – which has the largest, circular, stainless-steel door ever made.

Finally, Mr Lung said, he had to admit there were a number of danger zones in the structure – ‘killing-points' is what he called them – where, in order to counteract negative
chih
, it had been necessary to station living plants: a potted palm at the head of the escalator ‘in case of a fall'; more potted palms by the lift-shafts; yet more palms close to the pylons to nullify the colossal downward thrust of the building.

‘Right,' I said. ‘I'd like to ask you one thing. I believe that “dragon-lines” never run straight, but are curved.'

‘True,' he said.

‘And isn't it also true that traditional Chinese buildings are almost always curved? The roofs are curved? The walls are curved?'

‘Yes.'

Chinese architecture – like Chinese art, Chinese language and the Chinese character – abhors the rigid and rectilinear.

‘Now, as a
feng-shui
man,' I persisted, ‘how would you interpret this rigid, straight-up-and-down Western architecture? Would you say it had good or bad
chih
?'

He blanched a little, and said nothing.

‘These cross-braces, for example? Good or bad? Would you consider putting plants underneath them?'

‘No,' he said, blandly. ‘Nobody sits there.'

My question, I have to confess, was most unfair, for I had heard on the grapevine that the cross-braces were terribly bad
feng-shui.

It was obvious I had overstepped the mark. At the mere mention of cross-braces, Mr Lung moved onto the defensive. He back-pedalled. He smiled. He re-emphasised the good points, and glossed over the bad ones. He even left the impression that there were no bad ones.

At the foot of the escalator he shook my hand and said:

‘I have done
feng-shui
for Rothschilds.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

O
livier, your father and I have known each other since I was eighteen and he was thirty-one and I always associate him with hilarious moments. None was more hilarious than our visit to the Soviet Union which coincided with your arrival.

You will have been told a thousand times how your greatgrandfather was a Bolivian
hacendado
, who, one day, found two American trespassers with bags of mineral specimens on their backs. He locked them in a stable, thinking the minerals might be gold or silver. Finally they confessed the specimens were tin. That is one side of your family history.

In the spring, twenty-one years ago, your father learned that I had an official invitation to visit archaeological museums in the Soviet Union and also to meet Soviet archaeologists. The man who invited me I had met the year before in Sofia where I assured him that a treasury supposed to have been found at Troy was either a fake or a fake on paper. The rest of the party was to include my professor of archaeology and a lady Marxist archaeological student from Hampstead.

We met in Leningrad. G.O. was Doctor O of the Basel Museum. For the first days he behaved like Dr O. He listened patiently – although he nearly exploded afterwards – to the rantings of an orthodox Marxist archaeologist. The museum impressed him greatly. He saw Greek objects, but he saw objects he had never seen before, treasures from the frozen tombs of Siberia, objects from the Siberian taiga.

On our last day in Leningrad we had an interview with the Deputy Director of the Hermitage Museum. The Director himself was away in Armenia excavating the site of Urartu. It would not be fair to say that your father only reached the door handle, but he is not a tall man, and the space suited him ideally. We were, after all, in the Tsar's reception room. The Deputy Director greeted us with great kindness, but was plainly shocked by his previous visitor. As we entered a notorious pedlar of fakes from Madison Avenue went out. He had told the Deputy Director, in the name of his own foundation for the investigation of forgeries, that the celebrated Peter the Great Gold Treasure had been made by a jeweller in Odessa in 1898. Your father rose to the occasion and assured the man that his visitor had been a complete fraud. He then got carried away. The mask of Dr O vanished. He said, ‘This is the greatest museum in the world, right? I am the greatest collector of Greek bronzes in the world. If I leave you my collection in my will, will you appoint me Director of this museum for a number of years?'

We went on to Moscow and stayed at the Metropol Hotel. Dr O reasserted his identity. Again, in the Russian Historical Museum, he saw objects he had never dreamed of. We went to a reception to meet seventy Soviet scholars and had to stand in line having our hands crushed. Our host, the top archaeologist of the Soviet Union and my friend from Sofia, was there to greet us. By the window, G.O. and I saw a pair of very cheerful figures looking at us with amusement. I said, ‘One is an Armenian, the other a Georgian.' When our fingers stopped being crushed, we went over to these two gentlemen. I was right about the Armenian. The other, with a huge black moustache, was a Greek from Central Asia. I asked what they were laughing about. They said they had just been paid for their doctoral thesis and were deciding if they had enough money to go to the Moscow food market and buy a whole sheep for a barbecue.

G.O. passed the test of being a great Greek scholar. On our last evening in Moscow we were invited by the top archaeologist himself to an Uzbeg banquet. The only dish was a lamb stuffed with rice, apricots and spices. The whole party became extremely drunk on wine, on champagne and, worst of all, on brandy. I was very drunk myself, but threw every second glass on to the floor. The Soviet academicians went under the table one by one. G.O., the Marxist lady archaeologist and the professor went off to the lavatory and were sick. The top archaeologist, in a steel-grey suit, was drunk and the only survivor except for his sister, who did not drink. She asked me to recite speeches from Shakespeare. I stood up: ‘If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it.