Feng Shui Wood Bolsters Fortunes in Lai Chi Wo

Published in The Dress Circle September 2006

More than a hundred years ago the people of Lai Chi Wo, a tiny village in Hong Kong’s North-eastern corner of Sha Tau Kok, lived a meagre existence. One day, exasperated with their lot in life, they called in a geomancer who suggested that they build a feng shui wall around the back of their village.

This feng shui wall, which took the form of a forest, would help them retain wealth and protect against bad luck, the geomancer explained. Over time, the fortunes of the people in that village did indeed change, with many becoming more affluent and better educated.

The villagers became loyal converts to feng shui and did everything within their power to protect their feng shui wood. They marked off boundaries and banned the destruction of local forests. Anyone found causing damage to the feng shui wood was penalised and publicly condemned. Villagers were allowed to enter the forest for only a couple of days in a year to gather firewood.

Feng shui woods are a common rural feature of Southern China. Owing to the fervour with which villagers guarded them through the centuries, many of these crescent-shaped forests remain standing today. Unlike the rest of Hong Kong’s original forest cover, most feng shui woods have been untouched by the deforestation and urbanisation that has swept so much of Hong Kong.

They are generally limited in size, and preserved on slopes behind villages. Besides giving villagers a sense of security and protection, feng shui woods help to mitigate the impact of typhoons and provide cool shade in the summertime. In the winter, they help keep the chilly winds at bay. They also act as breaks to disasters like landslides and fires.

Clues to Our Ecological Past

Today, feng shui woods play an important role in maintaining the biodiversity of the ecosystem, and because they contain patches of primary forest that were never cleared, they provide clues to scientists about Hong Kong’s original native plant and animal life.

“Hong Kong feng shui woods are like fragments from the past,” said Dr Martin Williams, a nature expert and director of Hong Kong Outdoors. “They give us an inkling of how our original forests once looked, with their (relatively) big old trees and diversity of plant life,” he explained.

In most of these ‘sacred groves’ can be found bamboo plants, mangrove plants, camphor trees, lacquer trees, tallum trees, incense trees and often a banyan tree at the centre. On the edges are usually fruit trees like longan, lychee, wampi, banana, mandarin, pomelo, rose apple, guava and papaya; planted there by villagers seeking additional sources of income.

If preserved intact, a feng shui wood is like a living herbarium that provides food and shelter for a variety of animal life. The fruit trees attract birds like the grey streaked flycatcher, and lots of other bird species like the Japanese quail, emerald dove and red-winged crested cuckoo nest in these woods. Species of dragonflies, amphibians and ants too have made these forests their habitats.

Many of the villages fronting feng shui woods are now deserted, often because of their remote locations and impossible access – abandoned towns that have reached the end of their life cycle. Walking through Wong Chuk Yeung village in Sai Kung, writer Steven K. Bailey was reminded of a spooky ghost town in an American wild west movie.

“One dilapidated home hosted a large bat colony; another house lacked a roof but still had dishes in the cupboard beside a huge brick kitchen stove, as if the village had been abandoned in great haste. Some buildings had simply collapsed,” he wrote on the Things Asian website.

With Hong Kong having one of the highest population densities in the world, feng shui woods in Hong Kong are always open to the threat of development. While in the past, villagers used to guard these woods with their lives, nowadays government legislations exist that afford legal protection for feng shui woods.

The majority of these woods are protected under the general Forestry and Countryside Ordinance, while those feng shui woods that are located within the vicinity of country parks are protected under the Country Parks Ordinance and yet others are listed as Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

Even the Japanese Army once had to bow to something as sacred as the feng shui wood. Dr Williams tells the story of a five-finger camphor, a camphor tree with five stems, which stands on the edge of the Lai Chi Wo feng shui wood.

When soldiers wanted to cut it down during the Japanese Occupation to better spot hiding guerillas and to utilise the wood to make furniture, the villagers there raised a fervent protest and managed to rescue four of the five stems. The soldiers only cut off one stem.

Today that tree still stands in Lai Chi Wo, four stems reaching skyward – a proud testament to its protected heritage.