Someone sends me a photo of a small brass animal on a shelf and asks which way its head should point. Or how many strings of old coins to hang beside the door. Or whether the gourd has to be blessed before it counts.
I usually can’t answer. Not because I don’t know what the various schools say, but because answering means writing rules for an object whose effect I won’t vouch for.
For anyone who didn’t grow up around these: the brass animal is a pixiu, a beast from old Chinese legend, sold today on the folk claim that it takes wealth in and never lets it out. The gourd is a calabash, genuinely common in Daoist practice for carrying medicine and water, now sold as something that soaks up illness. The coins are Qing-dynasty cash from five reigns, Shunzhi through Jiaqing, threaded on red cord and hung to turn away harm from the street.
The ones that do something
Start with what I’ll defend.
Some objects sold as remedies work, because what they change is the room. A screen or a console unit inside the front door is the clearest case. A great many Sydney houses built since the nineties open straight from the front door into one continuous living and dining space, with no entry hall at all. A house like that gives you nowhere to stop when you walk in: no surface for keys, no spot to take shoes off, and in winter the door opens directly onto the dining table. Put something half-height just inside the door and the path bends, a small piece of floor becomes its own place, and the draught breaks. A tall plant does the same job on a sightline. What a fiddle-leaf fig taller than you actually fixes is being able to see the toilet from the sofa, and it makes no difference whether it’s alive or whether anyone blessed it; a plywood panel does the same work. Rugs are more literal again. Most strata by-laws here require floors treated well enough that sound doesn’t carry to the flat below, and whoever lives underneath will tell you whether you complied. Then lights. The sun sits in the north in Australia, so it’s the south rooms that never get midday light, and in an older brick house with a windowless middle hallway the passage is dim at two in the afternoon. People walk faster through it without noticing they’re doing it. A floor lamp there does more than anything you could hang on the wall, and in every one of those cases you can say what changed.
The layer that works on you
The second layer is real. It lands on the person, and the house is unchanged.
An object in your line of sight every day keeps something on your mind. I’ll acknowledge that much. I won’t build a pitch on it, because the sentence that follows is always “so you should buy one.”
Pixiu, gourds, coins
The pixiu, the gourd and the coins all have a genuine place in the culture, and mocking them gets nobody anywhere. Cash coins really were currency; people began stringing them up partly because copper cash was easy to come by and five reigns made a lucky number. Gourds really were carried by Daoists, and still are. But having a place in the culture and stopping the road outside your door are separated by a long gap, and I can’t fill that gap in, so I promise no effect. In Australia there’s a legal layer on top: consumer law deals with misleading claims, and “guaranteed wealth” printed on a label stops being purely a metaphysical question. Most shops don’t print that anyway; the labels say ornament, or craft item.
On gourds and illness in particular: see a doctor. Anything touching health, law or money belongs with a doctor, a lawyer or a licensed adviser, not with me.
I don’t sell any of it either. The shops that do sell them earn better than I do, and with far less driving, because one design sells to a thousand people while a house can only be read once.
Unrelated, but useful if you’re bringing one back from a trip: Australia wants wooden items, seeds and dried goods declared on the incoming passenger card. Tick the box. Almost everything comes through anyway, and the penalties are for not declaring rather than for the object.
What a remedy actually is
Worth spelling out, because the English-language books blur it. 化解 is closer to dissolving something, or untying it. The English word usually put in its place is “cure”, and a cure is a thing you can be sold. That’s most of where the confusion comes from.
In practice a remedy is which side the door opens from, what you see first walking in, which wall the bed goes against and whether its head lines up with the door, where the stove sits relative to the sink, which stretch of corridor should be broken up, what goes on a particular window, and which route through the house people should stop using. Most of that costs very little. What it costs is sitting down and working out how this family moves through this house every day.
The expensive kind of remedy is structural. Moving a wall, changing an opening. Turning a stair landing around is the big one and it’s rare. That needs drawings and a builder, and past a certain scale it needs council. Most people never have to go there and I don’t push anyone towards it.
Every changeable item in a report I write carries a line saying what will be different once it’s done; if I can’t write that line, the item stays out.
Why the shops are full of them
Gift shops, herbalists, the front tables of the big Asian supermarkets in Eastwood, Hurstville, Box Hill, Springvale. The month before Lunar New Year the shelves are packed with this stuff. Online it never lets up.
There’s no conspiracy in it as far as I can see. The demand is genuine. People move into a new place and want to mark it, or they’re buying for their parents, or it’s a small red-corded thing for a colleague in December. That’s a different activity from having a house read, and the two don’t conflict. What I’d rather avoid is someone treating “I bought a charm” as “I dealt with it”, because once those blur, whatever actually needed moving doesn’t get moved. The weeks before Lunar New Year are when I get the most of these messages.
The part I can’t explain
Some objects I still can’t map onto anything in the form school. Shi Gandang is the one that nags at me: an inscribed stone set at the mouth of a lane, or against the wall a road points at, found across Fujian, Taiwan and Shandong, and old. Say it blocks the road and you have to explain how, given that it stops neither headlights nor noise, and nothing at that intersection is physically different afterwards. I don’t believe something that widespread came from nowhere. I also can’t tell you what it’s doing. When a client raises it, I say that much and leave it there rather than inventing a reason.
Back to the photo. The pixiu you already own can stay on the shelf. Point it whichever way you like the look of. It really doesn’t change how I read the house.