Sunset on the empire by Kathie Merriman My Feng Shui master once told me that the reason the British Empire had failed was because the ruling classes had turned their houses around. I didn’t quite understand or really believe him then. How could he possibly know? I asked myself; he’s Chinese, not English. A few years after the above statement was uttered, and many hundreds of hours of feng shui studies later, I was asked to do the Feng Shui on a crumbling pile of Old England in the South Downs, Surrey. The people who had recently bought it were a classic pair - he was a city financier - did deals, made pots of dough. She was an interior designer-turned-holistic-healer; tuned into energies and keen to convert the building into a residential healing centre with style. Nice idea, I thought. Good intentions; a nice project too work on. Now I am not going to try and bamboozle you with too many Feng Shui facts, dear reader, but it will be helpful if you bear in mind the following two principles: 1. The Tiger and the Dragon When you stand and face the front of a building the left hand side is called the Tiger, and is the yin, or feminine side. Yin also means dark, dead, receptive, night, secret, contracting, etc. The right hand side of the building is called the Dragon and represents the Yang or masculine principle. Yang also means living, bright, day, creative, expanding, and is the driving force behind business and any creative venture. Both sides need to be present, and because the qualities of Yin are more powerful than Yang, the Yang side should be larger than the Yin side. 2. The Ming Tang The Ming Tang is the area in front of a house and represents the future of the occupant. If there is a large Ming Tang with beautiful gardens, future happiness and growth are almost guaranteed. If there happens to be water in the Ming Tang in the right place, then prosperity is assured. On the other hand, if your house faces a brick wall 10 feet away, you ain’t going nowhere. On my arrival at the Hall I pulled up at the big Victorian front door and rang the bell. The facade looked a bit forbidding with small windows, north facing, dark stone and dreary brick. My lovely blonde, fluffy client popped out of a side door leading into the newly converted and modernised kitchen and beckoned me in. “Oh do come in this way,” she said. “We never use the front door, it’s too difficult.” How strange, I thought, to want to usher your guests into the kitchen in a house this size! But that was the least of my concerns for I noticed that the house had been split. The right hand end, The ‘Dragon’, was subdivided off. My client had a lot to say about this. Apparently one of the previous owners had become very ill and died here, leaving a chunk of the house to his nurse in his will. She now lived there and was allegedly blocking every plan, change and development that my clients wished to undertake. “She’s a real dragon!” uttered my client. She sure is I thought, and she has all the power in this house. My client planned to develop the old ballroom at the left hand end of the house for receptions and functions. The Yin end. Doomed to failure before she even starts, I sighed wearily. I got the guided tour - out of the kitchen, into the great hall (passing 2 toilets, but that’s another story), through a fabulous dining room and out to the back of the house. There, I was presented with the most glorious view I have encountered in a long time. The whole of South England unrolled beneath my feet in a rich green carpet of trees and fields, rolling hills and in the far distance a bluish range of hills like a strong wall, protecting us from harm. The back of the house faced south. A big old Georgian front door (er yes, front door, not back) had been ripped out by the late Victorian owner and replaced with an equally big, but not as nice glass affair. The original door, complete with portico was now featured as a folly in the garden. How sad. The whole of the “back” had windows galore on each floor. But best of all, oh wise reader, was the garden. Not the garden of England that unfolded majestically before us, but their own ‘back’ garden. It was several acres of lawn, trees, shrubs and the most magnificent, huge, series of formal stone ponds with statuary and fountains. Green with algae and crumbling with neglect. ”Oh yes, it is called the White Lake,” my host informed me. Well, you’d best rename it the green swamp, I muttered silently, but was heartened when I heard they were restoring it to its full glory. At this point I had to inform them that their house was back to front. As you can imagine, this didn’t go down too well. “But look, at your view!” I exclaimed. “This is your Ming Tang. If you face this way you own half of South England! And besides, the woman at the dragon end of the house will lose her strength and become the weak, yin force. A single woman in the yin position is the correct balance. The ballroom and function area will be come the lively, creative yang force where business will flourish.” They looked at me aghast. Perhaps this is a good moment to fill you in on the history of the house: Built in the late 17th century by the High Sheriff of South England, he really was lord of all he surveyed. Later it was owned by one of the governors of the Bank of England, who probably owned most of all he surveyed. But then came the Industrial Revolution. Things hotted up, people became busier, automobiles arrived and folks just couldn’t be bothered going round to the front of the house which was designed for carriages, not cars. A Victorian industrialist bought the house and built a new front door at the back. Presto! Chango! A back-to-front house neatly coinciding with the fall of the British Empire. The house’s fortunes also changed from this point on. One occupant went mad and committed suicide, another died of a severe wasting disease and two owners have tried to develop it into a hotel and gone bankrupt. And now my clients thought they could change all this with a waft of feng shui, a wind chime here, a pot plant there, paint the bathroom green and put a water feature in the lounge. No mateys, I sighed. If you want to turn the fortunes of this house around, you have to turn the house around. But this back-to-front house is typical of many - most - stately homes in the country today. So maybe those aristos did know a thing or two. Did the Victorian and Edwardian industrialists’ desire for a quick buck have appalling and long reaching effects over at least three generations of Brits and most of the pink areas on the atlas? Perhaps if everyone who owns a back-to-front stately home in Britain repositioned their front doors correctly, the country could be great again.