July 7, 2006--Fanaticism XLII--AC6688
If you had 80,000 yuan to spare you could have bought the license plate “AC6688” for your car. 54,000 yuan would have gotten you “ACAPY888.” But to do so you would have had to have been in China at the annual license plate auction. And you would have had to have $10,070 to purchase the 80,000 yuan but only $6,750 to buy the 54,000 yuan.
To give you a sense of the value of just the 54,000 yuan consider that they could have bought you two cars (of course you would then have needed another license plate); they are the equivalent of 20-times what a typical farmer earns in China; and they represent nearly seven-times the country’s per-capita annual income. So anyway you look at it, it’s Big Bucks, I mean Big Yuan.
What’s going on here? We in the US are very familiar with Vanity Plates; but they typically say things such as “I’m An 11,” “Have A Good Day,” “Greed Is Good.” So why would the Chinese be willing to shell out so much for these plates?
According to an article in the NY Times (linked below) it’s because for centuries they have been obsessed with superstitions that surround numbers. For the Chinese, the number 4 is the unluckiest number—it represents death since the word for 4, si, also means death; and the word for 8, ba, means wealth. Get it—AC6688 is worth those 80,000 yuan since the two 8s portend very good fortune indeed.
Thus the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing will commence on August 8th of that year—8/8/08 at, yes, 8 p.m. A regional Chinese airline apparently paid about 2.4 million yuan (do your own conversion to dollars) to secure the telephone number 8888 8888. Eight 8s. If you believe in this stuff, that’s the one to fly—it will for sure be the safest.
If this sounds exotic to you, how to you feel about our Lucky 7s or the number 13, much less Antichrist’s 666? In many places you can’t give away a telephone number that begins with three 6s. And how many buildings here have 13th floors? In China, you will not be surprised to learn, no buildings have 4th floors.
Mao did his best to stamp out superstition, but as you can see with very little success. In fact, before the Chinese government began this license plate auction there was quite a market in bribes to acquire these lucky plates.
And yes, by the way, we did get home safely from Europe--knock wood.
To give you a sense of the value of just the 54,000 yuan consider that they could have bought you two cars (of course you would then have needed another license plate); they are the equivalent of 20-times what a typical farmer earns in China; and they represent nearly seven-times the country’s per-capita annual income. So anyway you look at it, it’s Big Bucks, I mean Big Yuan.
What’s going on here? We in the US are very familiar with Vanity Plates; but they typically say things such as “I’m An 11,” “Have A Good Day,” “Greed Is Good.” So why would the Chinese be willing to shell out so much for these plates?
According to an article in the NY Times (linked below) it’s because for centuries they have been obsessed with superstitions that surround numbers. For the Chinese, the number 4 is the unluckiest number—it represents death since the word for 4, si, also means death; and the word for 8, ba, means wealth. Get it—AC6688 is worth those 80,000 yuan since the two 8s portend very good fortune indeed.
Thus the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing will commence on August 8th of that year—8/8/08 at, yes, 8 p.m. A regional Chinese airline apparently paid about 2.4 million yuan (do your own conversion to dollars) to secure the telephone number 8888 8888. Eight 8s. If you believe in this stuff, that’s the one to fly—it will for sure be the safest.
If this sounds exotic to you, how to you feel about our Lucky 7s or the number 13, much less Antichrist’s 666? In many places you can’t give away a telephone number that begins with three 6s. And how many buildings here have 13th floors? In China, you will not be surprised to learn, no buildings have 4th floors.
Mao did his best to stamp out superstition, but as you can see with very little success. In fact, before the Chinese government began this license plate auction there was quite a market in bribes to acquire these lucky plates.
And yes, by the way, we did get home safely from Europe--knock wood.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
3:00 PM
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