HONG KONG
Caution is the watchword for the Year of the Rat, the lunar new year that begins tomorrow.
Chinese fortune tellers are predicting financial and political rumblings, tsunamis and epidemics in the year ahead.
The reason, they say, is that water and earth - two of the five elements Chinese mystics believe are at the root of all things - are in conflict.
"Earth usually conquers water, but it is too weak to control the rat, which symbolises the most powerful water," said Raymond Lo, a master of feng shui, the practice of trying to achieve health, harmony and prosperity by the arrangement of dates and numbers.
Predictions seem to be coming true already in China, where weeks of freakish cold have claimed at least 60 lives and crippled transport, leaving millions stranded on the busiest travel week of the year.
Vietnamese thoughts have turned to the animal honoured this year.
Tran Quang Thieu, 54, director of a rat extermination company near Hanoi, was revelling in the belief that the rodent population multiplies in a lunar rat year. "This holiday will mark the start of a booming year for us," he said.-AP
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