fearsome beasts

I was exploring the area between Shatin and Taipo recently when I came across a small temple:

Don’t ask me the name of the village where this temple is located. There is only one sure way to obtain this information, and that is to locate the village’s public toilet, on which the name is always recorded, but so far I haven’t been able to do that. And Google Maps is of no use here—villages are routinely named or located incorrectly on these maps.

The temple itself is not especially noteworthy, but I couldn’t help but notice the beasts standing guard outside. This is usually a job for lions, but less leonine creatures would be hard to imagine. They did resemble dragons though (dragon whiskers, scaly bodies), but these animals had hooves, not claws:

A cross between a dragon and a horse? I’d been pondering this conundrum for several weeks when, two days ago, I happened to notice a pair of similar creatures adorning the entrance arch to the village of Ho Sheung Heung (‘village above the river’), just west of Sheung Shui. I pass under this arch regularly, but always coming towards the camera, and my attention is always on the traffic, so I never paid much attention to anything else.

However, on this occasion I’d doubled back to take another run through the alleyway I call ‘the heart of darkness’, so I couldn’t help but notice the stone creature on the left. I saw that it was another dragon–horse hybrid and therefore stopped to take some photos:

Incidentally, dragons in Chinese mythology do not have wings. There are two ceramic sculptures of dragons facing each other, directly above the village name, in the archway.

I had already been wondering whether there was a specific name for the creatures that I’d seen guarding the temple, so, upon returning home after this second encounter, I did some research. And, guess what? They’re called lungma (Putongua: longma), which, unsurprisingly, translates as ‘dragon horse’!

My research also indicated a mistake I made in an earlier post somewhere on this blog (I cannot find where) regarding the phrase lung ma tsing san (Putonghua: long ma jing shen), which I translated at the time as ‘may you have the health of a dragon or horse’. I’ve been using this salutation every Chinese New Year rather than the more common kung hei fat choi, which is equivalent to wishing someone ‘a prosperous new year’ in English, because if I can choose only one, I’d rather be healthy than wealthy. However, I now know that a better translation of the phrase is ‘may you have the spirit [or vitality] of a dragon horse’.

There is another discussion point relating to this phrase, which Wikipedia describes, I think wrongly, as a ‘four-character idiom’, or chengyu. I’ve written previously about these phrases (The Proverbial Fool; Playing Piano to a Cow), and as far as I’m aware, to qualify as a chengyu, there has to be a back story. The only story that I could find relates solely to the lungma itself and not to its spirit or vitality. Wishing that someone will have this spirit is not how a chengyu works.

However, the lungma does appear to be related to the so-called ‘lo shu square’, which is a 3×3 magic square:

A magic square is one in which the sum of the numbers in every horizontal, vertical and diagonal line is the same, and in one ancient fable, this square was shown to a sage by a lungma, which, if you pause to think about it, belittles the ability of ancient Chinese mathematicians, who had reached the same conclusion as Pythagoras regarding right-angled triangles around the same time as the renowned Greek sage.

We now descend from fanciful to bullshit, because this square is the basis of fung shui (feng shui). I will not go into detail about something I’ve always regarded as irrational nonsense, but you will notice the yin–yang monad between the forelegs of the right-hand lungma guarding the entrance to Ho Sheung Heung. The basis of fung shui is the so-called pat gua (ba gua) or eight trigrams, which are arranged in a parody of the lo shu square with the monad in the centre. Thankfully, looking at these fearsome beasts, it’s just as well that they have no more basis in reality than fung shui.

Lung ma tsing san.