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London’s Chinatown Auspicious Fu Lions


1888 Mosaic Mural


Dim Sum & Dragons


By Helen Oon I


am staring intently at a giant mural in a shabby backstreet in London’s Chinatown. It looks like thousands of little squares assembled at random on a massive wall... but wait a minute... I can see a shape emerging. It is the image of a huge bowl of rice against a mottled background of yellow and brown. This is the award-winning “Rice Bowl” mural designed by a Hong Kong architect and designer Wing Kei Wong. Measuring 8m by 5m, it is made up of 1888 photographs of


48 FENGSHUIWORLD | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2011


Chinatown, its residents and visitors donated by the public. It is such a clever idea to use the photographs as mosaic for the mural. Wong explained that she called it “1888” because it is an auspicious number in Chinese numerology. The triple eight denotes prosperity and good fortune and the number ‘one’ sounds like ‘everyday’ in Cantonese, and together it means “good fortune everyday” for the people in Chinatown. Looking at the bowl of rice reminds me it is lunch time.


There is a plethora of restaurants in Chinatown to choose from, seventy-eight to be precise. Whenever nostalgia grips me, I make a beeline for Chinatown to seek out some oriental nosh and to savour the Asian ambience so redolent of my home country in Malaysia. The bustling shops and Chinese supermarkets at Gerrard Street sell everything Asian. There are stores


selling Chinese


cakes, pastries and all my favourite snacks. It is like strolling through a street in Hong Kong or any eastern city with Chinese songs blaring in the air and some signboards in Chinese character. It is in a world of its own yet just a stone’s throw away are Trafalgar Square, Westminster and Piccadilly and everything quintessentially English.


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