What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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:
    â€˜But they were not successful.’
    I said there were similar lions in London, outside the Bank of England.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜So what about the bad points?’ I asked Mr Lung.
    â€˜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