Thirteen Temples Chose Their Land. Residents Draw Lots.

On September 14 the Liberty Times reported a milestone in the relocation of Dalinpu, the village at the southern tip of Kaohsiung: thirteen of its religious bodies have finished choosing land in the new settlement, and eleven of the thirteen have signed letters of intent to buy. Two have not, and the city says officials will visit them in person. Every selection is meant to be settled and made public before the end of the year. The part of the report worth reading twice is how the choosing was done.

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By throwing moon blocks they asked the deities, confirming which street block of the settlement land they preferred.

Some congregations went further and carried the deity's palanquin to the site to pick the ground in person. Meanwhile the ordinary landowners of Dalinpu — a village that has spent half a century inside a ring of refineries, petrochemical plants, a steel works and a power station, which is the reason any of this is happening — will receive their plots in 2027 by public draw. Twenty-eight new roads are being cut to break the site into smaller blocks; work started in June. An owner picks a block in the order their ticket comes out. In early August residents told the United Daily News that nineteen of the lots have a road terminating at them — a road clash — and that nobody had asked them first. A borough chief said there had been no public hearing; a city councillor asked that the road-clash positions simply be marked on the plan before anyone chose. The Urban Development Bureau replied that an owner with road clashes in mind can give priority to a plot without one when their turn comes.

Moon blocks are divination. Siting is not.

Both practices in this story are traditional, and they are not the same kind of claim. Moon blocks (jiaobei) are a pair of crescent wooden blocks thrown on a temple floor: one face up and one face down is assent, and the question is whatever the asker put. It answers, and it gives no reason. Siting works the other way round. Flying Stars takes two numbers — the period a building belongs to, and the direction it faces, in degrees — and returns nine palaces of paired stars. Eight Mansions takes a birth year and a recorded sex and returns four directions that suit a person and four that do not. Both can be re-run by a stranger, and a stranger who re-runs them can show you that you were wrong.

That difference is not a ranking. A congregation that has asked its deity which block to stand on has an answer that is authoritative inside its own tradition and closed to outside argument, which is exactly what the moon blocks are for, and no compass in the world is entitled to overrule it. It is worth naming the difference anyway, because English-language reporting folds both under "feng shui" as though they were one practice, and they disagree on the most basic point of all: whether anybody else gets a say.

What a road clash actually describes

The road clash belongs to Form School, the half of the tradition that reads shape rather than numbers, and its claim is unusually narrow. A road that ends at a face of a building delivers whatever it carries into that face, instead of past it. This is the one entry on the popular list of household worries where the traditional reading and a traffic engineer are describing the same object. Headlights at a wall rather than along it, all evening. Engine noise and brake dust arriving at a window with no lateral flow to disperse them. And the failure case that gives the worry its edge: a vehicle that does not make the turn carries straight on into the building. Nothing about that needs a metaphysics to be true, which is why it is the part of this dispute we would defend.

A block is not a facing

There is a question the moon blocks have not answered, and cannot. Choosing a street block fixes an address. It does not fix a facing — the direction the building will face, in degrees — and that is the input every compass school in the tradition actually turns on. The ring divides into 24 mountains of fifteen degrees each, and a flying star chart for a site is not a near-miss of its neighbor across a boundary; it is a different chart. Our own tool refuses to choose for you when a measurement lands within three degrees of one, because at that distance the honest answer is that we do not know. So thirteen congregations have settled where they will stand and left the harder half open, to be decided later with the drawings. Anyone who tells them the ground is "good" without naming a number has answered neither question.

Our honest read

Of the two complaints in this story, the road-clash one is the better founded, and the city's reply is reasonable as far as it reaches: an owner who minds can take a block with no road clash when their number comes up. The weakness is arithmetic rather than principle. A preference exercised in draw order is only a preference while the blocks last, and the households drawing last are the ones left choosing among what nobody else wanted. Marking the nineteen on the plan before the draw, which a councillor asked for in August, costs the city nothing and is most of the fix; publishing the list is the rest of it.

The other thing to say is the thing the tradition cannot help with. Dalinpu is not moving because of the arrangement of its streets. It is moving because of what has been measured in its air for fifty years. Form School has a great deal to say about a road pointing at a door and nothing whatever to say about a refinery two kilometers upwind, for the plain reason that it was written before there were any. That is the edge of what a reading of the new settlement will be reading. Saying where a system stops is not a caveat we attach to be safe — it is the only thing that makes the part inside it worth having.