While riding in an elevator in Hong Kong, you might notice that a fourth floor does not exist, nor does any other floor ending in the number four. At some restaurants, the prices of almost all of the dishes end with the number eight. Flip through this magazine and you will find that local businesses tend to have phone numbers that end with multiple digits of three, six, eight or nine.

The Chinese are known to be superstitious, and these examples are small hints of the impact of numerology on everyday life. But when China’s stock markets are impacted by investors buying stocks with lucky numbers in their ticker codes, or when Shanghai markets plummet when reaching the ominous 4,000, one can see the real prominence that numbers have in Chinese culture.

The good and bad implications of each number are based almost solely on their pronunciations. The number eight sounds like the Chinese word for ‘get rich’, so it is one of the favourite numbers of the Chinese, hence the Beijing Olympics’ start time of the eighth second after 8.08pm, on the eighth day of the eighth month, 2008.

Other lucky numbers are three (sounds like ‘life’), six (a homonym of ‘smooth’) and nine (same pronunciation as ‘forever’). In Cantonese, the number two sounds like ‘easy’, so a combination of digits such as in the number 28 would imply ‘to easily prosper’.

The number four in Chinese sounds similar to the word for ‘death’ and therefore is avoided whenever possible. Although 13 contains auspicious connotations in Chinese, the 13th floor is often also omitted from Hong Kong’s buildings because it is an unlucky number in Western cultures.

Numerology is such an ingrained part of the Chinese psyche that even the most modern of Hong Kong people will be pleased to find out their new mobile phone number is made up of eights and nines. A vehicle license plate of lucky numbers is something of a status symbol, since it means the owner probably had to pay extra for it.

To foreigners, basing decisions both big and small on the sound of various digits might seem strange. It is not that most Hong Kong people rationally believe that being surrounded by fours will definitely yield tragedy and eights will bring fortune; rather, the observance of these superstitions reflects a ‘better to be safe than sorry’ mentality.

Leaving out fours from buildings and vehicle license plates ( two major Chinese cities have banned the disagreeable number from plates) creates a few less bad-luck numbers to worry about. Everyone, including this long-held superstition, wins.