Page 402 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A-Z 395
The other set of images is connected with sex. Feng-liu, ‘Floating in the wind’, is a
Romeo; ‘Wind and rain destroying the blossom’ a reference to an all-too-short love
affair. If we say that a woman ‘loves wind and the moon’ we mean she is sexually very
active, as the metaphor suggests prolonged love-play during nights together. An
undefiled maiden is said not to have ‘felt the waves of the wind’, while a prostitute is ‘a
person of wind and dust’ (here, dust representing the things of this world, which the
Buddhist sees as fleeting and transitory). ‘Fighting about the wind’ is a quarrel of a
jealous nature. ‘Wind shoes’ are shoes curved like the feathers in a bird’s tail – that is to
say, women’s shoes.
In a third set of images, wind figures as an illness, as ‘inner wind’ – i.e. a stroke. The
word feng is connected with the admittedly differently written word feng = madness. A
‘wind-mirror’ (feng-jian) is a soothsayer. ‘To turn into wind’ (feng-hua) refers to the
practice of taking revenge by leaving the corpses of enemies unburied to rot.

Wine

Wine

jiu

Chinese wine is mostly made from grain ( rice). Wine made from grapes is mentioned
in ancient texts, but it does not seem to have appealed to the popular palate. Certainly, far
more tea is drunk. Wine is drunk in company and at receptions in restaurants, wine-
shops and brothels. Drunks are a rare sight. Towards the end of the Later Han Dynasty,
when all sorts of stimulants were being tried out, ‘hard drugs’ were added to hot wine.
The classical literature records the names of innumerable kinds of wine; today, Mao-tai
and Shao-xing wines are particularly popular.
Wine in China never acquired the sacramental significance which it has in the

Christian world. When it is poured from a bowl in sacrifice, it is rather as an additive to
the food which is being offered to the god.

Wolf Wolf

lang

The wolf, which is found in North China, symbolises cruelty, rapacity and greed. Thus,
someone with a ‘wolf’s heart’ is cruel, while a greedy man is ‘as greedy as a wolf, with a
tiger’s eye’. A ‘wolf-look’ awakens mistrust or fear. Wolf and tiger are connected again
in a proverb which says: ‘Better to kill ten tigers than one wolf’ – because tigers are
usually solitary creatures, while wolves hunt in packs and take revenge if one of their