As Old Master Meng said, "Food color is also." "Lustful people, ancient and existential."
The ancients' pursuit of "beauty" is far beyond the imagination of today's people. Throughout the five thousand years of history, the emperor who has achieved the deepest and farthest in the "color" path is the Qianlong Emperor.
How "lustful" was the Qianlong Emperor? From the popular costume drama "Yanxi Raiders", we may be able to glimpse it.
Filmed in the background of the Qianlong Dynasty, "Yanxi Raiders", its tone is calm and atmospheric, the texture is exquisite and rigorous, and it changes the drawbacks of the traditional Qing Palace drama with colorful colors, which makes the audience shine.
Some people believe that the "Yanxi Raiders" uses a lot of dignified dark colors, dark green, and a variety of generous and elegant plain colors, which is a color technique known as "Morandi color", and its color is peaceful and natural, soothing and elegant, full of high-end feeling.
But in fact, the color use technique in "Yanxi Raiders" is really not from the hand of the famous Italian oil painter Morandi, but the "beautiful color" left to us by the ancestors.
During the Qianlong period, the Jiangnan Weaving and Dyeing Bureau retained a "Qianlong Color Spectrum", which recorded dozens of beautiful colors, totaling the following:
The blue system has fish white, jade color, moon white, dark blue, royal blue, stone green, red blue, yuanqing; yellow system has bright yellow, golden yellow, apricot yellow, persimmon yellow, raw agarwood, wheat yellow, sunflower yellow, autumn fragrance, sauce color, bronze, beige, camel; green has pine green, dark official green, yellow official green, official green, melon skin green, water green, sand green, bean green; purple system has lotus, dark lotus, iron purple, true purple, purple red, green lotus; red system has red, water red, peach, big red, fish red...
From this "Qianlong color spectrum", it is not difficult for us to see that the beauty and variety of colors in ancient China have exploded in today's art world in minutes.
In ancient times, all kinds of beautiful colors were not exclusive to painters, but were closely related to people's daily lives.
For example, according to the Tang Dynasty code, officials wore more than three pins of purple, four pins of deep silk, five pins of light silk, six pins of dark green, seven pins of light green, eight pins of dark green, nine pins of light green, and common people's clothes of yellow.
For another example, Tang Shili's words for exaggerating women's skirts abound: red has axie skirt, lotus skirt, pomegranate skirt; green has willow flower skirt, green Luo skirt, emerald skirt; yellow has thin skirt, tulip skirt...
You see, if you are a person with a heart, just through the interesting colors of ancient times, you can explore and salvage many secrets and legends that lie quietly in the depths of history.
Guo Hao, a former visiting scholar and cultural scholar at the Kennedy School of Harvard University, is such a person with a heart, in recent years, Guo Hao has devoted himself to the examination of color literature and combing the traditional Chinese chromatography system from the perspective of traditional culture and oriental aesthetics.
In his new work "Traditional Chinese Colors: 100 Lectures on Color General Knowledge", Guo Hao salvaged 100 ancient and mysterious color words from the color source stream, and restored them to the original appearance of all things in heaven and earth in the form of small lectures, thus presenting the ancient people's perception of color.
Guo Hao takes the expression of color in history, etiquette, literature and art as the starting point to explain to readers the source flow and aesthetic characteristics of traditional Chinese colors, hoping that through his own interpretation, the traditional colors will enter people's daily lives, so that the cultural charm behind the colors will become the common feeling of Chinese.
Perhaps for a straight man, the most difficult thing in the world is to guess what color the lipstick his girlfriend puts on her mouth today.
Yes, in the eyes of men, the color of lipstick on the girl's mouth obviously looks similar, but the girl can subdivide them into grapefruit, aunt color, coral orange, Barbie pink, brick red, pumpkin red, rose red, plum color, bean paste color, retro red... Waiting for dozens of colors, it is really amazing.
However, compared with the traditional colors of ancient China, it is simply pediatric to distinguish dozens of lipstick numbers.
Traditional Chinese colors originate from heaven and earth, such as birds, animals, plants, mountains, landforms, celestial phenomena, etc., with a wide variety of varieties, and their names are beautiful and elegant, stunning. Here are a few examples of colors:
Lotus leaves are yellow, called "yellow leaves"; green peony, named "Oubi"; Xiaguang color pink, named "Haitianxia"; the purple color of the sunset mist shrouded in the distant mountains, named "Twilight Mountain Purple"; the Yellow River water color golden flash, called "Yellow River Glass"; the face of the Buddha, the gold leaf color, is for "Kujin"; the sky at dawn, called "the east is white"...
The jade color has "Mingyue Heng", "Ming Ke" and "Pei Jiu", the wine color has "Huang Bai", "Chun Bi" and "Cui Tao", the color is white and blue, yingrun and elegant; the clothing colors are "Hai Tianxia" and "Tianshui Bi" tailored to the palace people's clothes, and there are "Lotus Silk Autumn Half" dyed in Tang tunics...
How did these beautiful and beautiful colors come about?
Guo Hao believes that any color word is an expression of "image", initially limited to figuration, and then extended to imagery.
The Book of Shang has clouds: "To the image of the ancients, the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the dragons, the flowers, and the insects, as the Huizong Yi." Algae, fire, powder, rice, mochi, and yellow embroidery, with five colors, as a costume, Ruming. ”
The Eastern Han Dynasty scholar Zheng Xuan commented: "Sex is known as cai, shi yue color." The color of the unused predicate is used. That is to say, the ancients called the figuration of seeing "cai", and the figuration was used by human consciousness to become "color" - this is the origin of "color".
It can be said that behind these ancient and beautiful colors, there is an oriental aesthetic and ancient wisdom that has been passed down for thousands of years. These traditional Chinese colors are not only the way to define colors Chinese, but also the way to Chinese look at the world.
China is a poetic country, where every word and deed, every grass and tree can be included in poetry, and the color is no exception. In the poetry of ancient literati, flexible colors can be seen everywhere, adding a bit of playfulness to our traditional culture.
Su Dongpo wrote in the "Chibi Fu": "In the boat where the phase and the pillow are, I don't know the whiteness of the East." ”
On this night, Su Dongpo and his friends drank and drank and stayed overnight on a river boat. Early the next morning, Dongpo had just opened his eyes and saw the faint sky on the river—it was a blue and white color. This color is called "the white of the East" in Su Dongpo's pen, and it is also what he calls "the color of the eye encounter" in this fu.
Wang Bo wrote in the "Preface to the Pavilion of King Teng": "The water is exhausted and the cold pool is clear, and the smoke condenses and the twilight mountain is purple." ”
The young Wang Bo stood at the top of the Tengwang Pavilion, the sunset reflected the mountains, the water mist and smoke, the afterglow solidified together, covering the mountains with a thin layer of purple, Wang Bo was thrilled, and the pen became "Twilight Mountain Purple". Is this moving color a real color, or is it Wang Bo's imagination? The beauty and movingness of it stems precisely from the unique poetry of China.
Xuanzang wrote in the Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty: "The water is colored with vicissitudes and waves, and the waves are sweaty. ”
What color is "Canglang"? Qing Dynasty scholar Bi Yuan proposed in his annotation of "Lü's Spring and Autumn": "Wolf, cyan also." In the bamboo "Cang", in the sky "Canglang", in the water "Canglang".
According to this view, "Canglang" is the color of bamboo that is born in spring, because "Cangshuo" is bamboo that is born in spring. When Qu Yuan wrote that "the water of the waves is clear, you can muddy me; the water of the waves is turbid, you can muddy my feet", what probably came to mind was a bamboo forest that was "straight in the middle and straight, not vines and branches".
In this book "Chinese Traditional Colors: 100 Lectures on Color General Knowledge", there are 100 kinds of traditional colors such as Xuantian, Tianmiao, Purple MillIng, Night Purple, Luo Zidai, Zhu Yanyi, Yujin Skirt, Emperor Shiqing, etc., and behind each romantic color, there is an interesting historical allusion.
For example, "Xuantian":
Xuan, the dawn of the sun jumped out of the sky before the horizon, it is not pure black, but black through the red, as the "Commentary" said: "Xuan, black and red for Xuan." ”
The Tao Te Ching Yun: "Xuan zhi and Xuan, the door of all the wonders." If you want to interpret the profound meaning of the Tao Te Ching, you must start with the word "Xuan"—Xuan is both a special moment of celestial phenomena and an enlightened enlightenment of the universe, and the original enlightenment of the Dao.
Another example is "Purple Mill Gold":
Purple mill gold, the color of the best quality gold. The Eastern Han Dynasty literary scholar Kong Rong once said: "The superior of gold is known as Zi Mo, and the Jews have a saint." It can be seen that purple mill gold is like a saint, with the best quality.
There are many more such examples, such as:
What is the relationship between the "honey and pills" mentioned in Zhang Zhongjing's "Treatise on Typhoid Fever and Miscellaneous Diseases" and "honey color"?
Is the "snail Dai" mentioned in "The Biography of Zhen Huan" and "Langya List" named because of the addition of conch powder to the formula? So how did "Green Sparrow Head Dai" come about?
What degree of depth and bitterness is it to be called "bitter green"?
And so on. Perhaps, only when we return to the heavens and the earth, food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, back to the refining process of plant colors and mineral colors, and return to the coloring of fabrics, murals, silk paintings, porcelain, lacquerware, architecture, paper, food, etc., can we truly trace the ins and outs of each traditional color, and can we dig into the poetic culture hidden behind them.
This is probably what Guo Hao really wants us to understand through this book:
"The traditional Chinese color is the elegance recorded by the ancients observing the mountains and rivers, the sun and the moon, the grass, trees, fish and insects, and it is also the poetry that blends into life. Each traditional color has its own story! ”