Page 96 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A-Z 89
Cricket

xi-shuo

The cricket is a summer insect. It symbolises pluck and fighting spirit; and children shake
them out of the trees and train them for cricket-fights. These encounters used to take
place in autumn on market days, and the owner of the winning cricket got an ox as a
prize. Cricket-fights are textually attested from the 8th century onwards. Nowadays they
take place, if at all, only in a few places in Central and South China, though I have often
seen children picking them up from trees and keeping them in a container.

Cuckoo

bu-gu

The Chinese cuckoo is also called du-juan, who was, according to legend, a ruler of
Sichuan (otherwise known as the ‘Soul of Shu’, Shu being an old name for Sichuan).
In the Bon religion of Tibet, the cuckoo is regarded as a sacred creature, as it is supposed
to have impregnated the ancestress of the founder of the Bon religion. It is said that the
cuckoo cries until it spits blood – which is how the azalea gets its colour. In a non-
Han minority group in the province of Guizhou, people do not mourn for their dead until
the cuckoo has reappeared.
The peasants in the province of Sichuan pay a lot of attention to the cuckoo, which

helps them to pick the right day for starting various jobs on the farm. The local dialect
has several expressions for the bird, like ‘reap the wheat’, ‘forcing us to plough’,
‘watching the silkworms’ or ‘watching the fire’. ‘Fire’ here probably refers to the ‘fire-
star’, Antares ( Scorpionis), whose appearance was a key date in the agricultural year.

Cypress

bo

Cypresses are often to be found by graves; the tree lives to a great age, and it adds an
appropriate note of permanence to the burial site. The tree is also a symbol of
longevity. In pictures, it symbolises the wish ‘(May you have) a hundred (bai)