What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin

bound to be some anxiety; for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank is the pivot on which Hong Kong itself stands or falls. With 1997 in sight, prosperity and luck must either come ‘in the very near future’ – or not at all.
    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.
    â€˜This’, Mr Lung began, in a proprietorial tone, ‘is one of the Top Ten Buildings of the World. Its construction is particularly ingenious.’
    â€˜It is,’ I nodded, glancing up at the cylindrical pylons and the colossal X-shaped cross-braces that keep the structure rigid.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 ?
    â€˜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