By DPA
Taipei : A Taiwan village that changed its name to avoid bad luck claims the move actually worked.
The village in Tainan County, south Taiwan, used to be called Shuai Si Hou (Drop Dead Monkey,) where many villagers were injured after falling down from high places or from motorbikes, the Liberty Times reported.
Some of the accidents were weird. A man who was good at climbing trees fell to the ground and was badly injured while picking longan, a sweet tropical fruit.
Six years ago villager Yang Liang-kui, a feng shui (wind and water) master, went to another village to check the feng shui of a house. On his way home, he fell down and injured his spine. A year later, he found that he was suffering from prostate cancer.
Yang believed his village really did have good feng shui as it was surrounded by hills and trees; so he suspected the village’s name was to blame.
So Yang launched the name-change campaign, but many villagers opposed it because “Shuai Si Hou” had been used for 200 years.
In April, Yang finally collected enough signatures to change the village name to Chang Hsing Village, meaning Long Prosperity Village.
Since then, there have been almost no major accidents among the villagers, the paper said.