Exorcising a Dragon

When bulldozers began clearing ground for a parking lot last November, Hong Kong government engineers expected no obstacles greater than some boulders and a few scruffy trees. They reckoned that the parking site, on a hill atop the tiny border village of Lok Ma Chau, would enable busloads of tourists to view China conveniently from the hill's observation post.

What the surveyors had failed to detect was the baleful presence of an invisible cliff dweller--a dragon widely believed by local villagers to have lived there at least since the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960-1279).

According to the village patriarch, Man Hing-lap, the bulldozers have aroused the dragon from his slumbers and he is now breathing vengeance on the local population. The first victim was Man's grandson, who came down with a mysterious fever. A few days later, seven other of his grandchildren were similarly stricken. Aghast, Man called for his local diviner, who quickly appraised the situation: the dragon's nose had been cut off by a bulldozer; in revenge, the dragon had put a curse on the whole Man clan, which since the 1200s has made up all of the 3,700 population of Lok Ma Chau and the neighboring village of San Tin. To avert catastrophe, the expert declared, construction of the parking lot must cease immediately.

Villagers prevailed upon construction workers to stop work until the dragon had been propitiated. Taoist priests were brought in to exorcise the demon. A member of the Man family predicted a "bloodbath" if government officials did not meet the village's demands. These included payment of thousands of dollars in expenses for exorcism and for hospitalization of stricken members of the Man family. For good measure, villagers mixed in a shakedown with their superstitions and demanded that the government construct a new drainage system and sidewalks for the village.

Geomancers' Help. Such shenanigans have long bedeviled the development of Hong Kong. Scarcely any new buildings are erected there without the help of geomancers and other specialists in Chinese superstitions. Recently one such expert solved a morale problem among despondent police officers at a Hong Kong police station. He installed two antique cannons at the station entrance, aimed across the street at a "monster" that the policemen were convinced was disguised as a commercial exhibit. When one of the exhibit halls was damaged during a typhoon, the police said that the creature's "horns" had been shot off. Morale boomed.

Now, if construction at Lok Ma Chau is ever to be completed, the cannons may come in handy to slay the dragon of the parking lot. If that does not work, maybe a plain old payoff in the form of new village sidewalks will pacify the dragon.

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