Modern Fung Shui Living Spaces

Central is the busy financial district of Hong Kong Island. Narrow, crowded streets packed with pedestrians, double-deckers buses, trams and nifty, fast-moving red-and-white taxis hardly allow for a leisurely walk. Yet, alongside the overbearing highrises, sit the stately, squat, and expansive heritage buildings representing a different aesthetic of space. My favorites among these restful sights are the Flagstaff building and the St. John’s Cathedral.


The Hong Kong Park straddles the spaces between these two building and came as a delightful surprise the first time I saw it! A charming example of the Fung Shui Woodlands that comprise the cultural landscape of the city, the Hong Kong Park forms an interesting natural and simulated fung shui ecological buffer zone between nature and the city. The built-up stairway waterfall simulates a gurgling stream, to cut out the sound of rushing traffic, beyond which lives a cool, dark, wooded grove of old, gnarled Chinese banyan, silk cotton and pongamia.


This week the Park was a noisy riot with the sounds of birds like the Red Whiskered and Chinese Bulbuls, Yellow Crested Cockatoos, Koels, Spotted Doves and Rose Ringed Parakeets. A pool, very typical of Fung Shui Gardens, was filled with Carp in hues of yellow, gold, orange, white, grey and black that moved in unison to the vigilant, watchful eye of a rather rascally night heron. Given that it was lunchtime, the Park was filled with visitors, who had come to watch the fish over a brown bag lunch, enjoy the sense of space under the canopy of flowering trees or catch up on one’s reading in the sunshine. Most of us watched the Heron in tense anticipation of what was expected to come! But the Carp chanced it every time! They took turns to swim in pairs, squint from underwater for a quick, distorted look before rushing back to base! My jaw dropped at their tenacious curiosity.


Gardens and Parks support different life forms and provide a living space without discrimination to all beings, including the birds, trees, the local office-goers and me. In busy cities, large colonial buildings bring their gardens with them. An inclusive urban culture does therefore merit that gardens and old buildings coexist within the big busy hubs of large cities as the new modern oasis of the expanding urban concrete deserts.