Chinese Lucky Numbers: Why 8 Wins and 4 Is Skipped

In Chinese number culture the lucky numbers are 6, 8 and 9, and the number to work around is 4. Each of them is a pun. 八 bā, eight, sits close to 發 fā, to prosper. 六 liù, six, carries the sense of things running without obstruction. 九 jiǔ, nine, is an exact homophone of 久 jiǔ, long-lasting. 四 sì, four, is one tone away from 死 sǐ, death. The whole system runs on sound rather than on symbolism, which is why it does not travel intact into other languages.

How tight each pun is depends on which Chinese you are speaking. In Cantonese the eight and prosper pair is much closer than in Mandarin: 八 is baat and 發 is faat, a single consonant apart, which is one reason the enthusiasm for eight runs hottest in Hong Kong and Guangdong and spread outward with Cantonese-speaking emigrants. Four works the other way. 四 and 死 are near-identical across Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and Wu alike, so avoiding it is the one part every Chinese-speaking community recognises.

Belief is not quite the right word for most of it. A developer who prices the eighth floor higher is answering demand rather than acting on conviction, and buyers who pay the premium tend to explain it as resale logic. Skipping four is the sturdier half, because leaving a number off a lift panel costs nobody anything, so it survives in places where no one involved would call themselves superstitious. Plenty of people in China observe the whole thing in public and ignore it entirely at home.

Lucky: 6, 8, 9
Avoided: 4
Where: Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora
Language: Mandarin and Cantonese
Mechanism: 八 bā (Mandarin), baat (Cantonese) ≈ 發 fā / faat
Sourced claims: 5 on this page

The wordplay behind it

What each number sounds like, stands for, or resolves to. This table is the whole explanation in one place.

Number	Written	Read as	Echoes	Meaning
8	八	bā (Mandarin), baat (Cantonese)	發 fā / faat	to prosper, to make a fortune	Lucky
6	六	liù	六六大順 liùliù dàshùn	may everything run smoothly	Lucky
9	九	jiǔ	久 jiǔ	long-lasting, enduring	Lucky
4	四	sì (Mandarin), sei (Cantonese)	死 sǐ / séi	death	Avoided
14	十四	sahp sei (Cantonese)	實死 saht séi	bound to die	Avoided
28	二八	yih baat (Cantonese)	易發 yih faat	easy to prosper	Lucky

The lucky numbers: 6, 8, 9

One at a time, with the mechanism and one place it actually shows up.

6 — smooth going

Six is the quiet one. 六 liù carries the idea of flowing without catching on anything, fixed in the toast 六六大順 liùliù dàshùn, roughly may everything go smoothly for you. That is a wish for the absence of trouble rather than for the arrival of money, which is why six shows up on wedding dates and in the amounts tucked into red envelopes more often than on shopfronts. Businesses that do use it favour 666, painted large. Six also sits close to 祿 lù, the salary an imperial official drew.

8 — the prosperity homophone

Eight is the number Chinese businesses compete for. 八 bā resembles 發 fā, the verb inside 發財 fācái, to make a fortune, and the resemblance is tighter in Cantonese, where the two differ by one consonant. That produces a real market. In Chengdu in August 2003 the telephone number 8888-8888 sold at a municipal auction for 2.33 million yuan to a bidder acting for Sichuan Airlines. Hong Kong's Transport Department runs the same trade in vehicle registration marks, where plates carrying eights clear seven and eight figures.

9 — the number that lasts

Nine is the exact homophone in the set: 九 jiǔ and 久 jiǔ are the same syllable and the same tone, separated only in writing. The second means long-lasting, so nine attaches to weddings, anniversaries and vows rather than to trade. It also carried imperial weight as the largest single yang digit. The main gates of the Forbidden City are studded with nine rows of nine bronze door nails, eighty-one in all, a count that ranked below the emperor no household was allowed to use.

The numbers to avoid: 4

Same treatment. Where an avoidance has a documented cost, it is named.

4 — one tone from death

四 sì and 死 sǐ are the same syllable in different tones in Mandarin, and in Cantonese they are closer still, sei against séi. What follows is architectural rather than personal. Hong Kong towers routinely omit 4, 14, 24 and the whole of the forties, so a flat sold as the 68th floor may be forty-something storeys off the ground. Compounds inherit the problem: 14 in Cantonese echoes 實死, bound to die. The habit travelled well enough that Vancouver legislated against it in 2015.

Where you actually meet it

Lift panels are where you meet this first. A Hong Kong residential tower will often leave out 4, 14, 24, 34 and every floor from 40 to 49, which is how a building advertised as 88 storeys ends up barely half that tall. Vancouver stopped the practice in new towers in 2015 after developers brought it with them, and the city's chief building officer framed the rule as levelling the field between different communities' preferences. Existing towers kept their gaps.

Numbers you can buy are where the preference becomes a price. Hong Kong's Transport Department auctions registration marks every Lunar New Year, and the ones carrying eights go for millions of Hong Kong dollars: 88 fetched HK$11.4 million in February 2025 after thirteen minutes of bidding, and 28, which sounds like easy to prosper, set a record of HK$18.1 million in 2016. On the mainland, mobile-phone dealers price a SIM card by how many eights sit in the number.

Cash gifts follow the same arithmetic. Red envelopes at weddings are filled with amounts built from sixes, eights and nines, never from fours, and a gift of four of anything reads badly whatever it is. Couples choose wedding dates on the same basis. The Beijing Olympics ran the logic at full volume: the opening ceremony started at 8:08 pm on 8 August 2008, the eighth minute of the eighth hour of the eighth day of the eighth month of an eight year.

Checkable claims

Each of these is a documented fact rather than a general impression, with the source named.

The Beijing 2008 Olympic opening ceremony began at 8:08 pm on 8 August 2008, a start time chosen for the run of eights.

Beijing Organising Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad

On 19 August 2003 the telephone number 8888-8888 sold for 2.33 million yuan at an auction in Chengdu to a bidder acting for Sichuan Airlines. The hundred numbers in that sale raised 7.13 million yuan between them.

People's Daily, 19 August 2003

A study of Chengdu apartment transactions from 2004 to 2006 found second-hand flats on floors ending in 8 sold for about 235 yuan more per square metre, and that new-build flats on those floors sold 6.9 days faster than others.

Shum, Sun and Ye, Journal of Comparative Economics 42(1), 2014

At the Hong Kong Transport Department's Lunar New Year auction on 16 February 2025, the registration mark 88 sold for HK$11.4 million, the second-highest price of the day.

Hong Kong Transport Department vehicle registration mark auction

A 2001 paper reported a rise in cardiac deaths on the fourth of the month among Chinese and Japanese Americans. A later study of Hong Kong deaths from 1995 to 2000, in a population over 95 per cent Cantonese-speaking, applied the same method and found no such excess.

Phillips et al., BMJ, 2001; Panesar et al., Medical Journal of Australia, 2003

What it changes

None of this moves an outcome. A flat on the eighth floor is not safer, a plate with three eights has never made a business solvent, and four has never hurt anybody. What the pattern does show is that a language can price things: a pun repeated for long enough becomes a market, and the market is measurable even though the luck is not. That is a genuinely interesting fact about how people live, and a terrible basis for a wager.

That is the line this site holds everywhere: a tradition is worth knowing, and no number has ever moved a probability. If you want a set of numbers to play with anyway, the daily generator makes one from your birth date and tells you exactly how.

Chinese lucky numbers — frequently asked

Because 八 bā sounds like 發 fā, the verb for prospering. In Cantonese the two are nearly identical, baat and faat, which is why the preference is strongest in Hong Kong and Guangdong.

It is real and easy to check for yourself. Lift panels in Hong Kong and mainland cities skip 4 and the forties, hospitals and hotels renumber around it, and Vancouver had to write a rule in 2015 requiring new towers to number every floor after developers imported the habit.

Mostly, at different intensities. Four is avoided in both. Eight is felt more strongly in Cantonese because baat and faat are a closer match than bā and fā. Cantonese also builds compounds Mandarin does not, like 14 for bound to die and 28 for easy to prosper.

Not generally. It picks up a funerary shading from the seventh lunar month, when the Ghost Festival falls, and from 頭七, the rite held on the seventh day after a death. Away from those contexts it is an ordinary number.

It changes the price and nothing else. The auction results and the floor premiums are documented. The luck is not.

The other traditions

Same questions, different language and different answers.

GermanLucky 3 4 7 · avoid 13 IndianLucky 108 9 7 · avoid 8 ItalianLucky 3 7 13 · avoid 17 JapaneseLucky 3 7 8 · avoid 4 9 JewishLucky 18 7 13 · avoid 2 KoreanLucky 3 7 · avoid 4 RussianLucky 3 7 · avoid 2 13 ThaiLucky 9 5 · avoid 6 4 WesternLucky 7 3 12 · avoid 13

More ways in

Unlucky numbers13, 4, 17, 666 and 39, and the documented history of each.Open →Chinese zodiacTwelve animals, their lucky numbers, and the lunar new year rule.Open →NumerologyThe western system: one number from a birth date or a name.Open →

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