Why Is the Number Eight Lucky in Asia?

In 2003, an airline paid more than a quarter million dollars for a phone number. Not a clever one, not a rhyme, just a string of eights: 88888888. Sichuan Airlines wanted it for a customer hotline, and the price was 2.33 million yuan, about $280,000 at the time (04:49). Nobody had answered a single call yet. The number itself was the product. That transaction is the hinge of this solo episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, in which Ferriss spends thirty minutes chasing a single idea across three languages and three countries: luck, it turns out, is not something you stumble into. In large parts of East Asia, it is something you specify, price, and build.

The root of it is a pun. In Mandarin, the number eight is pronounced ba. The word for prosperity, as in the New Year greeting gong xi fa cai, roughly "congratulations, may you prosper," uses a sound, fa, that echoes it closely enough to matter (01:49). Ferriss is careful about the mechanics: fa means to emerge or depart, cai means wealth, and the pairing fa cai, to come into riches, rhymes with ba just enough that eight absorbed its meaning. The association is old, but Ferriss notes it was "supercharged" in the 1980s, especially in Hong Kong, before spreading outward (03:39). He is also quick to puncture a certain Western fantasy about Eastern asceticism: "If you squint a little bit and look at some actual proper translations or the original text, man, everybody loves money" (04:04).

Once a sound becomes a value, prices follow. A Hong Kong government auction sold the license plate "88" for 11.4 million Hong Kong dollars, about $1.5 million, in February 2025 (06:12). Beijing scheduled the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony for 8:00 PM on August 8th, and 15,646 couples registered to marry in the city that same day (06:37). These are consumer choices, people paying extra for a symbol. The more interesting turn, as Ferriss puts it, is "when you stop buying lucky numbers and start building them" (07:04).

Building Luck Into Concrete and Steel

Shanghai's Jin Mao Tower has 88 stories because the client wanted that number, according to architect Adrian Smith, and the building doesn't stop there: it has an octagonal core and eight main structural columns, so the number does symbolic and load-bearing work at once (07:04). The effect shows up at a smaller scale too. Economists studying Chengdu apartment sales between 2004 and 2006 found that units on floors ending in eight resold at roughly a 7 percent premium. In the new-construction market, where prices were fixed and uniform, the lucky floors didn't cost more, they just sold about a week faster (07:37).

Four is the mirror image of eight, and the reason is grim. In Mandarin, four is si, and to die is also si, a near match broken only by tone (08:13). Ferriss, a long-ago student of the language, remembers a college Chinese class that started with 32 students and lost half of them within two weeks, partly because the tonal gymnastics are exhausting to produce (08:36). The dread of four shows up wherever eight shows up, just inverted: many East Asian buildings, like American buildings skipping a 13th floor, skip floor four entirely.

Nowhere is the stakes-raising more visible than in casino design. In 2004, Time reported that Sands Macao replaced the classic 777 jackpot symbol on its slot machines with 888 (09:45). Feng shui, which translates literally as "wind, water" (10:30), became a formal part of the design process. Las Vegas Sands executive William Weidner described, in a 2005 interview, designers rendering their floor plans in 3D, burning them to DVDs, and flying them to a feng shui master in Kowloon, Hong Kong, for review (10:08). At Sands Macao, a sharp corner was rounded off because a consultant believed the edge would deflect good chi, or energy, arriving from the northeast (11:28). The corner of a casino became, in Ferriss's phrase, "a business decision about where good fortune might go, get trapped, move" (11:56).

For the highest of high rollers, the customization gets personal. Architect Paul Haritakis described designing a private gaming room at The Venetian in 2012 where a feng shui expert used the gambler's own birthday and zodiac sign to shape the layout (12:21). Reporting from 2016 described Caesars VIP villas with numbers beginning in eight and Wynn properties that skip floors 40 through 49 altogether, avoiding the unlucky four twice over in a single range (13:09). The paradox, as Ferriss frames it, is that the player wants the room lucky for the player, and the house wants it lucky for the house. Veteran casino architect Paul Steelman, who has designed resorts across Asia, resolved the tension simply in 2015:

"The buildings have to be designed for good feng shui for both the player and the casino owner." — Paul Steelman, quoted by Tim Ferriss [13:29]

Even the U.S. government got a taste of the market. In 2015, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing sold uncut sheets of eight $2 bills with serial numbers starting in 8888, face value $16, retail price $58.88, limited to 16,888 sheets (13:48).

The Pun Doesn't Always Travel

Japan inherited Chinese characters, called kanji, but Chinese grammar doesn't fit Japanese, which conjugates verbs in ways Chinese doesn't. Over centuries, this mismatch produced two phonetic syllabaries, and today basic literacy in Japan requires learning about 1,945 core characters, the joyo kanji (16:30). Eight, in Japanese, is hachi, and its written form is visually suggestive: two strokes that spread apart toward the bottom, like a fan opening. There's a word for that widening shape, suehirogari, prosperity that grows toward the future (17:19). That visual logic, more than any pun, is why Toyoda, the founding family's name, became Toyota, the company name: written in the katakana syllabary, Toyota takes eight strokes, a number tied to wealth, while Toyoda takes more (18:36). Japan's Shikoku pilgrimage, a historic circuit tied to the Buddhist monk Kukai, visits 88 temples (19:25), another quiet accumulation of the number.

Korea complicates the story in a useful way. Korean has a numeral set borrowed from Chinese, and in it eight is pal, which doesn't rhyme with any word for wealth (22:05). The prosperity pun simply doesn't survive the trip. But eight still matters, because Korean fortune telling, saju palja, builds a birth chart from four pairs of characters, four pillars of year, month, day, and hour, each written with two characters, for eight characters total (22:31). Palja, "eight characters," became the everyday Korean word for fate itself. And four's dark twin crossed over too: in the same numeral set, four and the word for death can both be read sa, which is why some Korean elevators replace the fourth-floor button with the letter F (23:16).

The episode's closing turns, fittingly, to a myth about 666. In the West, Revelation 13:18 ties the number to the beast. Heavy metal culture is often credited with borrowing it through the horn-hand hand sign, but Ferriss debunks that directly: the gesture is the mano cornuta, an old Mediterranean ward against the evil eye, not three stacked sixes (24:43). Black Sabbath singer Ronnie James Dio picked it up from his superstitious Italian grandmother and started using it onstage after joining the band in 1979 (25:42). Meanwhile, in Chinese, 666 can mean the opposite of evil: it echoes smooth sailing, and shows up in good-luck money packets at Chinese New Year (26:39). Luck, the whole episode insists, is not a universal constant. It's a local sound, pointed at a local fear, and if you control the sound, you can build the fear right out of the blueprint.