Ideas How to Keep the Dragons Happy

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Once erected, the Bank of China's new tower in Hong Kong will twist 70 stories upward like a megalomaniac Rubik's Cube. Its four triangular shafts will anchor their glassy rhomboids to a square base graced with traditional Chinese motifs. Designed for Peking's state bank by famed U.S. Architect I.M. Pei, the $128 million building is a Communist bow to Hong Kong's modern, money-chasing spirit. But the Communist bankers made one major blunder: they forgot to consult the masters of feng shui (pronounced fung shway). As a result, a hex could fall on the tower's capitalist neighbors.

Invented more than 2,000 years ago in China as a quasiscientific land- surveying technique, feng shui (literally, wind and water) has evolved into an esoteric mix of geomancy and architectural fortune-telling. The feng shui masters in Hong Kong and their counterparts in Taiwan, Singapore and other places with large Chinese populations can measure a building's ability to attract riches and prosperity based on the structure's shape, direction, location and the presence or absence of benevolent dragons in the area. Even with a surveying charge of $12.50 per sq. ft., the geomancers are in great demand.

People in Hong Kong rarely build without first getting a feng shui reading of architectural plans. Merchants believe business failures occur when the natural, harmonious movement of spirits is thrown into confusion by misplaced pillars, tables, windows or television antennas. With good feng shui, money flows in; with bad feng shui money flows out. Hong Kong's colonial government has long compensated rural villagers whose feng shui has been disrupted by land development. Together with the worship of Mammon, belief in feng shui appears to be Hong Kong's dominant religion.

Without the approval of a feng shui master, the Bank of China building, still a hole in the ground in central Hong Kong, is off to an inauspicious start. Since last month a number of preliminary feng shui studies have begun, and much of the news was not good. While the building will stand on the most propitious geological line in the colony, some masters believe the triangular elements of the structure spell bad luck. Reason: the acute, pointy edges would slice through the yin-yang, or cosmic balance, thus pricking and angering unwary spirits, who would then direct their anger at buildings toward which the triangles pointed. Though the unauthorized feng shui readings seem to indicate that the Bank of China would gain at the expense of others, the psychic note of aggression was far from the comradeship Peking hoped to project. The building, in short, would anger not only the spirits but the neighbors.