We had been trying for months to arrange this dinner, which the couple I was meeting planned to host at their flat in Beijing’s northern suburbs. But by the time the date came around they had moved out while the builders moved in to reshape the place.
“We had the Feng Shui master in and we have to do a big job that means knocking down walls and replacing floorboards,” the husband said.
The problem was a built-in wardrobe in their bedroom that was messing up the Qi, or energy flow, in their home. The Feng Shui master thought this could be the cause of a succession of misfortunes the couple have suffered recently, and the husband agreed.
His wife slipped and fell a few months ago, breaking her wrist, and a couple of weeks later he noticed that the hearing was gone in one of his ears. But these were just the latest in a series of disappointments, the biggest of which was the failure of his wife’s hat business.
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Although she works full-time in a museum, her background is in design and over the past two years she has been making hats for men and women. She found a reliable manufacturer at a good price and friends helped with modelling and marketing the hats, which they all agreed were so good that she should put them on the international market.
She shipped a consignment of hats to Amazon in the United States, which charged her a monthly fee for warehousing them, and made them available on the platform. But just before she slipped and broke her wrist, she received a message from the company saying that they were planning to dispose of all her hats because in all the months they had been on the platform, not one had been sold.
For more than 3,000 years, Chinese people have used Feng Shui as a system to arrange spaces in a way that promotes balance, harmony and the flow of positive energy. Feng Shui masters charge anything from RMB1,000 (€121) to RMB100,000 (€121,000) for a consultation, depending on how famous they are and how extensive the survey.
The most illustrious tend to come from families with a tradition of practising Feng Shui or have been mentored by famous masters. Others offer online consultations, appearing on social media platforms alongside astrologers and fortune tellers.
There is no law against charging for such services but the authorities are alert to the danger of scams, especially those that prey on the elderly or vulnerable. Fortune tellers can be prosecuted for false advertising if they promise to alter fate or to secure wealth and they can also face charges for promoting “feudal superstitious ideas” that affect social stability.
Police in Nanjing this year arrested 92 people over a scheme that used fake Feng Shui consultations to defraud more than 1,400 people, raking in more than RMB46 million. Among the victims was a widow who signed up for free courses with an online mentor after she watched a video warning that if the Feng Shui was wrong, domestic trouble could follow.
The mentor checked in on her every day, subtly extracting details about her family, her health and her savings. She persuaded the widow to enrol in an advanced course with a senior instructor for RMB3,999.
The senior instructor also called every day and one day he warned her that her daughter would contract a blood-related disease in the coming months unless he performed rituals to avert it. The widow transferred RMB30,000 to cover the “disaster eradication” fee but when she called her daughter to tell her the good news, the daughter called the police.
When I told some friends a few days later about the couple moving out of their home on the Feng Shui master’s advice, one said he understood why they did it. He has recently decided to move out of the flat he has shared with his partner for two years as soon as the lease comes up for renewal.
He thought at first the problem was a set of shelves for shoes that was right in front of the door when you came into the flat and that was always untidy. But after he moved it and nothing changed, he decided the problem was with the apartment itself.
“Since we moved in there, my pay has dropped by 30 per cent and I’ve lost my sex drive. It’s totally gone,” he said.
“And you know what? The couple who lived there before us were just married when they moved in but they were there for five years and didn’t have any children.”
