Hungry Wolves and Cleopatra’s Needle.
“Qi descends from the mountain on the Wind and is held at the Water. Therefore care for the Water and protect against the Wind.”
The Book of Odes
Sometimes a moment in childhood can set the course of a lifetime.
It was a warm July day in 1963 when my mother and I climbed the Washington Monument. It was an experience hard to forget: I was very young and there are 896 steps. The sky was blue and clear of cloud, so from that height we could watch the Potomac River snaking out from the spit of land the Monument stands on and make out the weirdly precise right angled “Federal” Triangle formed by the Monument, the White House and the Capitol, framed by Pennsylvania Avenue, 15th Street and the Mall.
From my perspective today this looks like very deliberate feng shui.
We have analysed the assault on the Capitol in 2021 and the incursion into Ukraine of February 2022 on my Ze Ri Xue (that is Date Selection) Workshops and I’m pretty sure that both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are using classical feng shui calculations. There are more brilliant feng shui Masters in Moscow perhaps than any other city in the world and if Putin is not employing them, he certainly should be.
The extraordinary number of Zodiacs in DC however has been well known to astrologers since the plans for the gridded city were first mooted by Ellicott and L’Enfant in the 1790’s. The relationship of those buildings to the transfer of power from empire to empire is less widely known. But what Trump almost certainly knows is that somewhere on the edge of that triangle is the Foundation Stone of the city, laid in 1792. And like me, he knows that may be quite important.
I was not taken into the city again that hot tense summer. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was the least of it, I heard. Not the place for a curious child with a fruity British accent. Generally I could be found in my happy place on the floor of the Giant supermarket out in the suburbs in Mclean, Virginia, reading Superman comics.
Another thing I didn’t know until much later was that some four thousand years earlier, the Pharoah Senusret of the 12th Dynasty had ordered twelve granite obelisks erected outside his palace at Heliopolis, the City of the Sun; each standing a mere 70 feet tall (about half the height of the Washington Monument on a similarly sized base) each polished to gleam in the bronze light reflected from the surface of the Nile. The columns were said to be the petrified rays of the Sun, indeed the Sun god Atem was thought to reside within them. Along with Senusret’s authority. Today Heliopolis is a suburb of Cairo and those obelisks scattered around the capital cities of the world.
We were out of DC for most of that July and August, roadtripping West to California on Route 66: the Grand Canyon; Tucson, Arizona; Monument Valley. And Wendover, Utah where my father made one of his regular fragile commitments to upping sticks permanently to the US: Wendover Utah, alfalfa centre of the world. “His dreams” as Judy Collins sang in her song My Father, “like boats we knew we would sail in time”.
The Chinese term for that obelisk shape is t’ang lung which was also news to me until 2006 when I happened to attend a talk by a Chinese Master at a feng shui conference in Hong Kong. His theme was that China was deliberately leaching power and influence from the US and that the Jiu charms: mou kuk, dzik fu, goy moon and principally t’ang lung, the hungry wolf, were the instruments.
He first showed the HSBC building with its mock cannons trained at the Bank of China Tower and the reflective glass-clad Cheung Kong Centre ducking between the two; the swimming pool at the top of the Hopewell Centre placed to put out the filter tip it resembles, and Jardine House with the thousand portholes that are meant to immortalise its maritime origins but are known locally by a very rude name.
He drew attention to buildings that like the Jiu charms, mimic the profile of mountains and hills in the landscape, some ridges, some peaks, some round, some more square, some very hard to describe. These hill shapes are reckoned to be the key to tapping into the power of the lung mei (or Dragon veins) that for better or worse, bring the qi (that is energy) down from the heights.
The Ford Falcon broke down somewhere in Texas where I learned what a motel was. Better than a U-Haul trailer for sure. And following that, Las Vegas. To a child not allowed to enter a casino, Vegas was pretty over-rated. Beyond the security ropes in Caesar’s Palace I remember adults with paper cups full of dimes and quarters stuffing the fruit machines like they were penguins at feeding time. Where was the fun in that?
The story goes that after he took Heliopolis, Alexander the Great moved all but one of Senusret’s obelisks to the harbour of his new capital at Alexandria. Some say that Egypt’s power was thus transferred to Greece. Be that as it may, Alexander died, as the records go, at 32 sighing “for fresh worlds to conquer” having plundered most of the real estate between the Adriatic and the Himalayas.
About four centuries later the so-called Flaminian obelisk arrived in Rome from Alexandria at the order of the Emperor Augustus, to be joined by the Lateran in AD 357. Then as imperial power shifted to the Eastern Empire, a further obelisk was transported to the new capital of Constantinople.
We were put up by friends on the El Toro Airbase not far from Disneyland and although I was unaware of the existence of the Beach Boys, I got to surf at Hawthorn Beach, their home from home – if by “surf” you mean surviving the undertow. I never did manage to hold onto the actual board for more than a few seconds.
The Hong Kong Master went on to point his light pencil at the many t’ang lungs on the Beijing skyline and then dodge questions about the timing of the Beijing Olympics coming up in 2008. Many of us could see that the proposed dates suggested awareness of Ze Ri Xue.
That November of 1963 JFK was assassinated. Like so many others I can tell you exactly where I was when I heard. Hard to forget seeing through my fingers my father’s face recalling how he had watched as it was happening on US tv, Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas police station.
Over time the Flaminian and the Lateran columns settled into the mud of the Tiber but in August of 1588 by order of the Austro-Spanish Habsburg King Philip II, the Lateran column was salvaged and re-erected just as his Armada set out to stifle the upstart British Empire. Which of course did not end well for Spain.
And as it turned out, though Egypt was not occupied by a European power again until Napoleon arrived at the end of the 18th Century, it’s clear that some of Senusret’s obelisks were still standing even then, as Bonaparte was able to order one shipped to Paris only for it to be lost during a storm in the Bay of Biscay. Its replacement stands today in the Place de la Concorde.
I spent most of the rest of that August back on the floor of the Giant reading Justice League of America and Green Lantern comics and it was every minute of a further fifty years before I considered what the relative locations of the White House, the Washington Monument and the Capitol might have been indicating. One of the first things I learned however as a student of Chinese Metaphysics in the early 90’s was that knowing the date of construction and orientation of a building was the key to tapping its power. And working with certain key buildings and locations could influence whole areas. Could three carefully located buildings really affect the fortunes of continents? My friend Master Howard Choy taught that the effects of feng shui were better understood as correlative than causal. But I never bought that one.
Anyway, in 1878 the obelisk known as “Cleopatra’s Needle” arrived in London from Egypt and was erected overlooking the Thames Embankment close to the seat of Empire in the Palace of Westminster. The final obelisk of which there are records was erected in New York’s Central Park in 1881 just about 4000 years after Senusret.
And so the hungry wolf crossed the Atlantic.
It’s hard to overlook the zodiacs and Egyptian statuary in Washington, from the Smithsonian to the Pentagon; less speculation exists concerning the feng shui principles involved. But it’s a matter of record that L’Enfant’s paymasters on both continents were Freemasons who might know something about that.
As it happens in 2013 I attended a Xuang Kong Da Gua refresher course with Master Mas Kehardthum, as rigorous and brilliant a Master as I have known. On that course we examined the feng shui of Washington DC as well as the Marina Mandarin Hotel in Singapore, recently built on land reclaimed from the sea. There were mysteries about both: had the hotel’s early misfortunes anything to do with the orientation of the river mouth altered by the change in the coastline? I actually wrote a piece about this for Lillian Too’s magazine at the time.
What still concerned me more however was the question as to whether Washington DC was designed in keeping with ancient principles that feng shui might share with Masonry. And what this might mean about global power and its waxing and waning. Master Mas had done extensive calculation and had views which I won’t pursue just yet except that it took me back to those slides of Beijing; so much construction: scaffolding and cranes and undeniable Jiu shapes along the skyline. I could see feng shui reasons for gaping holes and so on but I was never too sure about the butterflies, wedges, rhomboids, spheroids and tubes. So many buildings. And so many t’ang lungs.
Even in 2013 I did not conclude. But what I do know is that on that day in 1792, the cornerstone of both the White House and the city it serves was laid in the East Wing of the White House. The principles of Classical feng shui indicate that huge power might fall to someone who knew the precise location and date that foundation stone was laid at the apex of that right angled triangle. It’s easy to get over-imaginative with this stuff but….perhaps we now know why the East Wing of the White House needed to be lifted. Perhaps we’ll never know.
I doubt that I considered the Washington Monument again that year or the next when the Beatles restored some joy to an America still devastated by the loss of its young prince: playing the Ed Sullivan Show three days before and four days after the Chinese Lunar New Year. The Beatles always had a magical sense of date selection, better than L’Enfant and Ellicott, better even than air traffic controllers.
Richard Ashworth © 2026
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