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FENGSHUI CONTROVERSY

On 18 December 2007, South Korea's Donga News Agency reported on a new controversy brewing around the ancient Chinese art of fengshui. Architects in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and beyond have long included design and landscaping considerations dictated by fengshui experts in their plans, but authorities in the People's Republic of China have been wary of what had long come to be regarded as a 'superstitious pseudo-science'. The situation in mainland China has changed in recent years. Many Chinese scholars have called on the Chinese Ministry of Culture to inscribe fengshui geomancy, sometimes rendered in English as 'topographic divination', on the national register of intangible cultural heritage items. In June 2006, local scholars set up the Chinese Topography Divination UNESCO Cultural Heritage Registration Committee and a number of universities, including Nanjing University, have set up courses in fengshui.

The Chinese media recently reported that the National Museum of Korea and a dozen institutions in that country will complete arrangements in 2008 to register fengshui as an item of Korea's intangible cultural heritage, and this has sparked off another battle between Korean and Chinese bloggers in cyberspace. Chinese netizens claim, 'Korea stole the Dano (Duanwu or Dragon-Boat) Festival and now they are trying to take away fengshui.' Donga News Agency reported that the Chinese media claims are false, and the National Museum of Korea has publicly stated that those media reports are baseless. The Korean Cultural Heritage Administration is only nominating the registration of Chosun Dynasty Royal Mausoleum and a dinosaur fossil site in 2008.

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