Number taboos in a Chinese elevator
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This elevator panel image was sent to me by Nick Kaldis:
It's immediately obvious that floors 4, 14, and 24 are missing because:
sì 4 || sǐ 死 ("death")
The absence of 18 is not so easy. It's because:
18 || shíbā céng dìyù 十八层地狱 ("eighteen levels of hell")
Note that the word for "level [of hell]", viz., céng 层, is the same as that for "floor [of a hotel or other multi-story building]".
For those who are interested in an exhaustive cosmology of Chinese hell, I highly recommend this virtuoso Wikipedia article, which has these sections:
Alternative names (21 more common different names)
Conceptions and terminology
Ten courts of King Yanluo / "King Yama" (यम राज/閻魔羅社, Yama Rājā)
Eighteen levels of Hell — each one described in two versions (e.g., Báshé dìyù 拔舌地獄 ["Hell of Tongue Ripping"] and Nílí dìyù 泥犁地獄 ["Naraka Hell"]) and as mentioned in the late Ming novel Journey to the West (Diàojīn yù ["Hell of Hanging Bars"])
For the heavily annotated translation of a medieval vernacular, prosimetric tale of a Buddhist saint who goes down to the terrifying depths of hell to rescue his mother, see the "Mùlián biàn wén 目連變文" ("Transformation text on Maudgalyāyana") in Victor H. Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For the judicial landscape of the Buddhist Chinese hell, see Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
When I was studying Classical Chinese at the Middlebury Summer School in 1969, I stayed in the Delta Upsilon (ΔΥ) fraternity as a temporary dormitory. Since we had a Chinese only pledge (we spoke Mandarin, not Classical Chinese, except when reciting old texts!), we had to come up with a Chinese name for the building we were staying in. We called it "Dìyù táng 地狱堂" ("Hell Hall"). It was appropriately very hot that summer.
Selected readings
- "A medieval Dunhuang man" (7/17/23) — with valuable bibliography
- "Applied Quadrophobia" (11/14/17)
[Thanks to Zhaofei Chen]
Philip Taylor said,
November 29, 2024 @ 11:46 am
I have certainly witnessed at first hand the omission of the number 4 in Chinese floor numbering contexts, but failed to appreciate that other floor numbers too may well have been omitted. Mea culpa …
Fritz Newmeyer said,
November 29, 2024 @ 1:16 pm
In my building in Vancouver, and in many others, there is no floor numbered 4, 14, 24, etc. There are four apartments per floor in my building. They are numbered, for example, 1501, 1502, 1503, and 1505.
Philip Taylor said,
November 29, 2024 @ 1:23 pm
The terrifying thing about Wikipedia's account of the "Eighteen levels of Hell" is that I very much fear that all 18 tortures described therein have been applied in real life …
David Morris said,
November 29, 2024 @ 4:01 pm
It's still the 4th apartment or floor even if it's labelled something else. Without elevators, how many flights of stairs do I have to climb to reach the '5th' floor?
Here in Australia, I saw an apartment block which had something like 12A, 12B and 15, avoiding both 13 and 14.
Lothar von Falkenhausen said,
November 29, 2024 @ 4:08 pm
As far as I remember, some buildings in Hong Kong additionally omit the 13th floor to cater to the superstitions of Westerners. (Of course, highrises without a 13th floor are ubiquitous outside of China. One wonders where the custom of skipping unlucky numbers in numbering building floors originates; it may not be a Chinese invention.)
Cuconnacht said,
November 29, 2024 @ 4:32 pm
My cousin's apartment is in the 14th floor of his New York City building, just up from the twelfth floor.
Chas Belov said,
November 29, 2024 @ 4:40 pm
Interesting that the superstition has made it's way into Vancouver construction. I was aware of the large Chinese population there.
As for whether a fourth floor exists or not, sometimes buildings have un-numbered utility floors in between occupied floors. I believe that's happened with 13th floors and wonder whether it has happened with 4th or 14th floors.