What Chinese New Year will hold for New Zealand
Friday, 16 February 2018
The horses, rats and pigs among us will be having a good year, according to Chinese fortune tellers.
It's now the year of the dog according to the Chinese zodiac, so fortune tellers are in hot demand as people seek to find what might be ahead for them in the coming lunar year.
It's not going to be great for those of us born in the year of the dog, while it will be particularly good for the dragon, as well as the rats and pigs.
The second half of the year is going to be particularly successful for those three, says Peter Chan, a fortune telling enthusiast.
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It will bring business opportunities and opportunities for change, he says.
Chan, also deputy chairman for Auckland's Massey-Henderson local board, has told people's fortunes for the past 15 years at Auckland's annual lantern festival - a stall popular with revellers, where he uses the four pillars to interpret people's futures.
There would be some earthquakes around the Pacific rim, however NZ will be relatively unaffected, while stockmarkets would not be healthy.
'On the whole, this is a good year for New Zealand.'
Fortune telling in Chinese culture has been around for about 3000 years, and each of those years is predicted to bring something new for people, but the idea behind the predictions follows a rubric of past events and statistics.
People visit fortune tellers following bad times, if they've been sick or are looking for some good news. However it should not be taken as gospel, it's a bit like palm reading in Hindu culture, Chan says.
Vietnamese culture has a long history of fortune telling too, especially around the new lunar year, which has recently dropped in popularity, according to Vietnam Community New Zealand chairman Victor Diem.
Fortune tellers predict peoples futures different however, reading palms or tossing chopsticks and interpreting how they fall. Diem does not know of any Vietnamese fortune tellers here, however.
It was not a religious pursuit, Diem says, rather 'they are called superstitions'.
Feng Shui consultant Danny Thorn, who runs Fengshui88 says it's only natural people are drawn to hear predictions over the new year, however people do use fortune tellers in match-making or out of general interest.
The most popular way of predicting one's fortune was through the 'Four Pillars of Destiny', which follows the yin yang five elements theory, but faces and palms can also read to calculate people's futures.
Thorn says calling it fortune telling demeaned the practise, and the direct translation of the word for it in Mandarin, suan ming, was closer to 'destiny calculation'.
The theory helps to determine people's characteristics and physical attributes, which can then help in match-making or predicting the future.
Thorn says: 'People who have the dog in their four pillars will have something of a hard year, you can say. Those with the dragon in their year, month, day, or hour, will have a more turbulent or changing year.'