More than once, a line of thought has come to me in a hotel elevator.
Many hotels avoid certain “sensitive” numbers on purpose. They may try to accommodate both Western taboos and Chinese ones, so you often find elevator panels with no 4, 13, 14, or 24. And that raises a strange question: even if those numbers are omitted from the buttons, the physical floors themselves still exist. So is the bad luck supposed to follow the name, or the actual structure?
If I am staying on the 17th floor, and I mentally put back the missing 4th, 13th, and 14th floors, doesn’t my floor become the “real” 14th? If you explained that carefully enough to someone deeply superstitious, they might get angry to discover that, in physical terms, they had still ended up on the very floor they feared most. And if they then experienced something frightening because of that “14th floor,” superstition would seem to return to the material world after all. Suddenly, it would become a problem of physical reality: apparently it really was the 14th floor.
Of course, this is not a workable research method. Ghosts and omens are a black box to begin with, and even the meaning of a “taboo” is hard to pin down.
Still, a tourist site near the hotel offered a more grounded way to think about the same puzzle.
By Qujiang Pool in Xi’an, there is a scenic site known as Hanyao, the “Cold Kiln,” famous as the place where, according to legend, Wang Baochuan dug wild herbs while waiting for Xue Pinggui. Because of their love story, the site has become a popular stop for couples hoping to absorb some blessing for their own relationships.
But the story of Wang Baochuan and Xue Pinggui does not stand up well to scrutiny. These two supposedly faithful lovers were, in fact, invented figures. There are at least two explanations for how the tale emerged.
One version says the story was created in imitation of Fenhewan, the opera about Liu Yinhuan and the historical general Xue Rengui. Xue Rengui was a real figure, and because he was associated with Shanxi, he became a symbolic cultural figure there. Later, in Shaanxi, a kind of substitute narrative emerged: the fictional Xue Pinggui replaced Xue Rengui, and from that came the story of Xue Pinggui returning to the kiln to reunite with Wang Baochuan.
The other version is warmer and more human. It also begins with someone adapting Fenhewan, but not to compete over cultural symbols. Supposedly, it was done to save a person.
The story goes that a wealthy Shanxi family invited an opera troupe to perform the full Fenhewan for an elderly mother’s birthday. After watching, she asked what became of Xue Rengui and Liu Yinhuan, only to learn that Liu Yinhuan, after waiting in hardship for her husband, fell ill and died in the cold kiln. The old woman became deeply distressed by that ending. Her mood darkened, and her health deteriorated. Her son sought medical help everywhere without success. Finally, a famous physician learned the cause and prescribed a remedy for an illness of the heart: the family paid the opera troupe a large sum to write a new story modeled on Fenhewan. That story became Wujiapo, later known for the romance of Wang Baochuan and Xue Pinggui. The crucial difference was the ending. Instead of tragedy, Xue Pinggui kept his promise, returned to the kiln, and took Wang Baochuan with him. After seeing this revised story, the old woman recovered.
If that is how the tale arose, then the Hanyao by Qujiang Pool is obviously not the actual site of a historical event. It is “fake” in the literal sense, because the underlying story is itself fictional. Yet none of that stops couples from visiting, taking photos, and hoping for good fortune in love. By the late Qing period, the site even developed a shrine dedicated to Wang Baochuan, where people came to worship, gradually forming the cultural space that exists today.
So from the very beginning, Wang Baochuan was an invented character, and the romance itself was fictional. Yet later generations elevated it into a classic and even treated it almost like a miracle worthy of veneration. In that sense, it resembles the “physical 14th floor.” To me, the process of stripping away a symbol and then restoring it again feels like a process of free will.
Not long ago, someone asked me a question I found genuinely interesting: are people who become more successful or fortunate after moving an ancestor’s grave really benefiting because of the move itself?
I first asked him whether he believed there was any connection between ancestral graves and the fortunes of descendants. He thought for a while and said no. Then I asked whether he felt his life was going smoothly at the moment. He said yes, fairly smoothly. So I asked one more question: did he think that had anything to do with his family’s ancestral grave? He realized I had circled back and answered very directly: no, because I don’t believe ancestral graves affect luck in the first place.
That is where it gets interesting. People who report that life improved after moving a grave usually do believe the improvement was caused by the move. If we wanted to know whether the effect was real, we would need some kind of controlled comparison. For example, we could move the graves of those who claim life improved back to their original locations. Or we could move the graves of people who feel their lives are going well and believe it has nothing to do with ancestral burial sites, then see whether their fortunes change. Only from both sides could we begin to test whether a grave’s location truly influences someone’s fate.
It is easy to imagine the reaction. Anyone who thought their life had improved because of grave relocation would probably curse you for even suggesting moving it back. And when I asked the person discussing this with me whether he would be willing to join such a social experiment—move his family grave and see whether his life really became less smooth—he cursed me too.
To be fair, the experiment is deliberately provocative. It is not much different from telling a superstitious hotel guest that their 17th floor is, physically speaking, actually the 14th. Or telling couples posing for photos at Hanyao that the love story they are commemorating was invented.
Unfortunately, that conversation did not go very far, so I had to continue the thought on my own.
Take the Chinese fear of 4 and the Western fear of 13. Superstition, in the broad sense, is an irrational belief that a certain action or ritual has some magical efficacy. From a scientific perspective, superstition is also a normal psychological phenomenon. Whether a judgment is fact-based or entirely groundless, people still act on what they believe, and those beliefs can lead them to make choices they perceive as beneficial to their survival or well-being. Those choices—conscious or unconscious—can then help produce real outcomes.
But if we want to show that the outcome itself differs depending on whether someone adhered to superstition or relied on scientific reasoning, then we would still need the old process of bold hypotheses and careful testing. That would mean doing things like secretly relocating other people’s ancestral graves according to the method I just described; or comparing the reputations of actual 14th floors with renumbered “physical 14th floors” to see whether they are really more ominous; or tracking a thousand couples who visited Hanyao to find out how many actually stayed together.
Because superstition exists partly to help us make decisions we think will benefit us, large samples will inevitably produce survivorship bias. A murder on the 14th floor is more likely to attract attention, and people readily connect the event to the number 14. A couple who visited Hanyao and later announces their engagement online makes it easy for others to treat the site as the cause of their relationship’s progress. But many warm, ordinary, uneventful stories also happen on 14th floors. And some couples who visited Hanyao may break up the very next day. Those cases simply do not fit the symbolic pattern people are looking for, so they attract less notice.
The same goes for grave relocation. If someone becomes more successful or more content after moving an ancestor’s grave, the improvement is naturally interpreted as proof that the move was beneficial. But the two things do not automatically form a direct causal relationship. Plenty of people never move a grave at all—some do not even know where their family’s ancestral graves are—and still experience sudden turns for the better because of other opportunities or changes in life. That makes it very hard to prove any clear relationship between moving a grave and changing one’s fate.
The reason this topic interests me is that I keep trying to locate a subtle balance between fatalism and free will.
If the idea that moving a grave can change fortune belongs to fatalism, does that mean people no longer need to take responsibility for effort? Would changing fate then require nothing but grave relocation, with no need for human choice or action at all?
But look at it from the other side. If someone is unhappy with how life is going and therefore decides to move an ancestor’s grave, isn’t that itself an act of free will? And if that decision eventually coincides with a change in fortune, could it be that free will has already intervened in what was supposed to be fate?
I will leave the larger discussion there for now.
But one last question remains.
Suppose you tell a deeply superstitious person that the hotel room they booked on the 17th floor is actually, in physical terms, the 14th floor. That night, they become terrified, then more terrified the longer they think about it, and eventually suffer a mental collapse and kill themselves. Was that death caused by fate, by free will, or by the “physical 14th floor” itself?