Magic square

Another odd dream last night. Perhaps it is to do with the humid weather we are having.

It involved a small bit of real estate, a small bit of land in China, perhaps in Hong Kong, perhaps five yards square.

We, that is to say the British, were having to leave amid some acrimony.

But somehow, we were able to clear the bit of land and dedicate it to a special sort of formal garden, probably made of slabs of stone or of patches of gravel of various sizes and colours, rather than of plants.

At some point there is a transaction with an important Chinese lady, of middle years rather than young, and probably a relative of an important politician. She is rather angry that at the end of the transaction, I just tell her to keep the change in a rather offhand and condescending way, rather than going through the proper ritual of counting out the change with her. Perhaps detecting and correcting the odd deliberate error, all this being part of the proper ritual. All this while she is sitting crosswise in the driving seat of her small car, feet on the ground. I am standing next to her. I associate now to paying off taxi drivers through their front windows.

But it all turns out alright in the end. One of our older chaps wants to stay on, rather than come back to the UK, and we manage to arrange some kind of a small pension for him. He teams up with a local lady and over the years they are able to build the garden, along the lines illustrated above. It becomes something of a tourist attraction, perhaps a place of pilgrimage.

While over the same years I come to realise the wrong I did by not counting out the change in the approved manner.

Waking, I associate to the phrases 'magic square' and 'magic garden' and think that perhaps I have dragged something real up out of the memory. But Wikipedia is not encouraging on this point: there are Chinese magic squares of great antiquity - but nothing like this one. And magic squares more generally are mathematical toys rather than gardens. And while we have a couple of Chinese puzzles, probably brought from Singapore by BH's naval uncle, I don't think that is it either, not having looked at either of them for a while. Maybe I will get some more clues in the course of the day to come.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_Shu_Square.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square.