Page 399 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols 392
One should never wear anything white in one’s hair, as this is very unlucky. It is often
said that white is the colour of mourning in China. This is not quite correct: the word in
question is su which means a kind of unbleached sackcloth, and mourning apparel made
from it is a brownish-yellow rather than white.
‘Pure white’ (qing-bai) is an expression denoting virginity. Women are regarded as
sexually ‘impure’ during menstruation and after giving birth. Men ‘wash and cut
themselves pure’ when they have themselves castrated.
The ‘White Lotus’ was a powerful secret society which arose early in the 12th
century; the man who was to found the Ming Dynasty came from its ranks. The name
‘White Lotus’ carries the connotation of another, better and ‘purer’ world.

Wilderness
Wilderness

ye

The expression chao-ye means literally ‘Imperial Court and wilderness’; a contrastive
pair, consisting of, on the one hand, the capital city, the seat of the Emperor, and on
the other, everything outside the city walls or, simply, ‘outside’. Superficially the contrast
seems to be the same as that made in English between ‘town and country’, German ‘Stadt
und Land’. But there is a basic difference. Ye means ‘uncivilised’. A ye-ren is a ‘wild
man’, a barbarian, a man who lacks what a Chinese would call ‘culture’. It is significant
that nature in the raw is hardly ever, if at all, portrayed in Chinese painting; what is ye –
wild and terrible – is not held to be a fit subject for art. The landscapes we are shown are
those modulated by man: humanised or civilised nature. We see roads, here and there
houses, people. Even the rivers are in the service of man, as is evident from the fishermen
in their boats.

In many Chinese novels, bandits figure as ‘people of the greenwood’. As long as there
were still large forests in China these bandits were feared; one is reminded of the terrors
of the forest as described in German fairy-tales. This is one reason why Chinese
travelogues are so monotonous – travellers are only interested in monasteries, temples,
places of habitation, roads, and so on: i.e. in the marks that man has made on the
landscape which is itself, however beautiful, described in more or less stereotyped set
phrases.
Willow Willow

liu