Bats in Chinese is called bian fu (蝙蝠) or fu (蝠). The image of bats is often used to represent ‘good luck’ or ‘good fortune’ in Chinese decorative arts. It is not because the Chinese appreciate the appearance of bats, …
Gourd (葫芦 hu lu) in Chinese is pronounced similar to ‘fu (福, fortune)’ and ‘lu (禄, wealth)’, therefore its image is often used as a pun picture referring fortune and wealth. Related Pun Picture: May good fortune and ample official income …
According to the oldest dictionary in China, Shuowen jiezi 说文解字 (Explanations of Simple Graphs and Analyses of Composite Graphs), the earliest version of the character for ‘crane’ is a composite graph consisting of a pictograph for a bird, the present-day …
Either the clockwise swastika 卐 or the counterclockwise sauwastika 卍 is used interchangeably in Chinese decorative arts as well as in some religious contexts. Sometimes, the two opposite versions can co-occur on the same occasion without making a difference in …
Summer solstice, the longest day in the year, occurs in the fifth month of the Chinese calendar and Chinese astronomy believes that it stands for the apogee of the yang force in the annual cycle. Ancient philosophers warned in Classic …
The flower of the annual herbaceous species Papaver rhoeas has many different names in the West, such as common poppy, corn poppy, corn rose, field poppy, Flanders poppy, and red poppy. One of its names in China is yumeiren (虞美人), …
In the oracle bone script, the earliest form of the Chinese characters, the pictograph ‘福 (fu)’ consists of a pair of hands holding a wine jar in front of a sacred ancestral symbol. It means that, if the ancestors were …
No animal has exercised as much influence over the destiny of China as the horse, which was central to the power of the various mounted nomadic peoples who dominated north China during the Period of Disunion (220–581CE), and the entire …