Page 373 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols 366
Tobacco arrived in China via the Philippines. It was in the province of Zhejiang that it
first caught on. The oldest Chinese word for tobacco was an attempt at a phonetic
equivalent – dan-pa-gu. Then yan meaning ‘light yellow’ (because of the colour of the
dried leaves) came to be used: yan is also the ordinary word for smoke. A metaphor
for tobacco is ‘Thinking-of-each-other Weed’. This comes from a story about a man who
was so desolated by the death of his wife that he visited her grave every day. One day, a
plant grew up out of the grave which turned out to be a tobacco-plant – he smoked the
leaves and got over his bereavement. Virtually the same story is told about the opium
poppy.
TonesTones

sheng-yin

The five notes (tones) of the old Chinese scale symbolised happiness, war, drought,
water and unhappiness, in that order. A sage could assess the condition of a state by
listening carefully to its music.
According to legend, the Yellow Emperor (Huang-di) ordered Ling-lun to prepare
pipes giving a musical scale. Ling-lun took bamboo canes from the Yue-xi valley and
decided that the tonic of the scale should be huang-zhong – the ‘Yellow Bell’. ‘He blew
on it and said: that is as it should be. Then he cut the twelve pipes. As he heard the male
and female phoenix singing at the foot of the Yuan-yu Mountain, he distinguished
between the twelve keys. Therefore it is said: the tonic of the “Yellow Bell” is the base-
note of the whole-tone scale and of the scales derived from it’ (‘Spring and Autumn of Lü
Bu-wei’ tr. Richard Wilhelm). In this myth we find a reference to the sexual dance of the
pair of phoenixes, and also to the mouth organ which used to accompany such
dances and whose pipes were arranged to look like a bird’s plumage.
Tongue

Tongue

shetou

Recent excavations have yielded male figures with outstretched tongues; and one text
tells of a ghost in South China whose tongue reached down to the ground. There is also a
relief dating from Han times which shows a man with his tongue sticking out. The
significance of the outstretched tongue is not quite clear. One text seems to suggest that it
is a way of poking fun at someone else’s misfortunes.
The tongue of a young girl may be symbolically described as ‘fragrant tongue’.
Tooth