You can argue about whether people really believe in lucky numbers. It’s hard to argue with an auction.
Hong Kong’s Transport Department sells personalised and low-digit registration marks at public auction, and publishes the ten highest prices ever paid since the auctions began in 1973. Four of those ten places are held by numeric marks. The other six are single letters, which are scarce for reasons that have nothing to do with luck.
Table view
| Mark | Price | Year |
|---|---|---|
| 28 | HK$18.1m | 2016 |
| 18 | HK$16.5m | 2008 |
| 9 | HK$13.0m | 1994 |
| 88 | HK$11.4m | 2025 |
| Any mark containing 4 | Does not appear | |
Look at what the four numbers have in common. 28 — ji baat, which runs close to 易發, easy prosperity. 18 — sap baat, close to 實發, certain prosperity. 9 on its own, gau, the sound of 久, lasting, and the number of the emperor. 88, doubled prosperity.
Every single numeric mark in the table contains an 8 or a 9. Not most. All of them.
The hole is the argument
And then there is what isn’t there. Not one mark containing the digit 4 appears anywhere in the top ten — 4 being sei, a hair away from 死 sei, to die.
That absence isn’t a preference showing up in a survey. It’s a gap in a public record of what people were willing to spend eighteen million Hong Kong dollars on. Nobody had to say they avoided the number. The auction did the saying for them.
This is why the collection keeps coming back to this table. Most of what gets written about lucky numbers is anecdote — the missing fourth floor, the phone number somebody refused. Here the belief left a receipt.