SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963
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his wife to bury him in the crucial spot when he came to die, which in good time she did, wrapping him in a mat because she was too poor to pay for a coffin. Time passed and her son grew up to become a great scholar. Summoned by the Emperor to Peking he made the long journey north. On the way the boat he was travelling in got into difficulty but was saved by a god in a nearby temple. The people with whom the young scholar was travelling honoured the god for his help, but he refused to do so, going so far in arrogance as to strike the god on the head with his fan. Eventually he reached the capital and after a while returned home in triumph. He then showed himself so overbearing, especially in his behaviour towards his maternal uncle, that his mother rebuked him, reminding him that his father had died a humble death and had been buried in a mat. The scholar agreed to rebury his father in a fitting manner, but when he came to search for the body it was not to be found. While men were fruitlessly hunting for it round the spot indicated by the widow, the god whom the scholar had insulted appeared in the guise of a stranger and advised him to throw lime into the duck-pond, whereupon the body would appear. The scholar took the advice. The body rose at once to the surface but along with it came nine dead fish, only one of which had its eyes open.
Nine bright possibilities, that is to say, had been stored away in the fung shui; one of them had been realised in the success of the scholar — and that was now at an end; the others were ruined. (When I recounted this story to a Chinese friend in Singapore he capped it with one in which a passing scholar, on being told of the enormous success of a family which had stolen another family's fung shui and acted cruelly towards its members, sat down by the stolen grave and lamented. If such people could prosper by the principles of Earth, where were the principles of Heaven? He had hardly spoken when lightning smashed the tomb and put an end to the fortunes of the wicked family.)
61. I have already referred to the tomb of Sun Yat-sen's mother in Pak Fa Lam. I was taken to see it by a part-time geomancer. (He looks like an old-fashioned scholar. In his youth he was a graduate student at a famous American university and held some official post in Canton until the arrival of the Japanese. He now teaches in Hong Kong). His analysis of the site was briefly as follows. The high peak at the rear is excellent; it stands for authority and power. The front aspect is also very good; there is