【Barley Camp】The 23rd micro-lesson sharing
Sharing Guest: Zhou Wenhan (Writer/Art Critic/Curator)
He has traveled and written extensively in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Southern Europe He has written commentary articles and research reports on contemporary art, design, architecture, naturalism Chinese, travel culture research and other domestic and foreign media and research institutions such as 21st Century Business Herald, ft Financial Times, Beijing News, Beijing News, Economic Observer, Artist, Phoenix Weekly and Artron Art Network He has curated a number of cross-border art creative exhibition projects He also published the collection of essays on architectural culture, The Beauty of Ruins: Architectural Wonders on Eurasia (2010) A Collection of Botanical Culture Essays: The Humanistic Journey of Flowers and Trees (Published by the Commercial Press, 2016)
How do humans understand plants, how do they give different cultural meanings to different plants, and what cultural phenomena are reflected in the historical details of the spread of various plants in different regions and cultures? That's what I'm talking about in The Humanistic Journey of Flowers and Trees.
"Humanistic Journey of Flowers and Trees" was written during my travels in Spain, Italy, India, Southeast Asia and other places between 2008 and 2010, and the first one I started writing was "Jasmine: The Fragrance of India". At that time, traveling from north to south in India, outside many town temples, it was often seen that vendors were selling jasmine flowers on trolleys, which were used by locals to worship the gods, and some women would put jasmine flowers on their heads as accessories, and the pronunciation of the locals was "mallika", which surprised them to realize that Chinese the usual "jasmine" was actually a transliteration of the Indian pronunciation. This made me interested in the history of the spread of jasmine to China, as well as the historical background of how the opera "Turandot" and the folk song "A Beautiful Jasmine" spread. I realized that "jasmine" is both a plant and a cultural symbol, translated, disseminated and given different cultural meanings in Indian, Chinese, and European cultures.
1. How did sunflowers become cultural idols from ordinary plants?
In writing, the most profoundly touching for me personally are sunflowers, henna, linden trees and other plants that have appeared in personal experience and personally touched, perhaps when I was a child, I paid attention to eating, using and playing, and felt that it was a "natural" thing, but when I investigated the historical source and cultural meaning, I would find that many of them were actually foreign plants that were popular relatively late, or there were "misunderstandings" and "sublimation" in culture, which subverted the previous "habitual cultural view".
For example, young people in many cities in China regard the meaning of sunflowers as the promotion of vitality, which is the result of media propaganda in the past three decades, and Chinese 500 years ago may not have seen such a thing as sunflower seeds.
Sunflowers are native to the Americas, and were spread by colonists to other parts of the world, probably from the South China Sea in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, when the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Dutch were already entrenched there.
Before Van Gogh's sunflowers became a cultural symbol, sunflowers seemed to be just common ornamental plants in gardens in Europe.
The unknown Van Gogh was rediscovered and recognized by the European art scene in the early 20th century, but became a "well-known" cultural icon thanks to the developed mass media in the United States: In 1934, the American writer Irving Stone's "Desire to Live: Van Gogh Biography" came out and became a popular bestseller; in 1956, Hollywood adapted it into a film of the same name; and later Stone's book was translated into more than 80 languages in 50 years and distributed 25 million copies around the world.
As early as the beginning of the 20th century, Van Gogh's paintings were transmitted back to China by international students who went to Japan and France to study painting, but at that time they were only familiar with the oil painting industry.
It was not until after the reform and opening up that his paintings and biographies were widely disseminated – represented by the publication and hot sales of Van Gogh's biography in 1982, Van Gogh became an allusion known to the cultural community, and the contrast between him and behind him, the difficult and crazy experiences affected many people's imagination of the artist's role.
2. How did the symbol of love change from red beans to roses?
In the past two decades, "Rose" has become a flower of love in the hearts of Chinese urban people with the popularity of mass media and commercial promotion such as romance novels, film and television dramas. A hundred years ago, the flowers and trees associated with love in China were vanilla, red beans, lotus seeds, and even the branches of any tree.
"Red beans are born in the southern country, how many branches will be sent in the spring?" May the king pick up more, this thing is the most acacia. The Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei's plain poem touched many lovers of that era.
However, Wang Wei did not write about the edible red adzuki beans (vigna angularis) that we often eat today, but refers to the seeds of the peacock bean (adenanthera pavonia, also known as sea red bean) of the mimosa family or the seeds of abrus precatorius of the acacia subfamily of the legume butterfly flower subfamily. The seeds of the latter two plants contain poisonous ingredients and can only be used for ornamentation and cannot be eaten as food.
The symbol of "acacia" in the eyes of the Central Plains people between the Han and Wei dynasties was the Mandarin duck and the acacia tree in general, and the Jin Dynasty Ganbao added the plot of "reincarnation of the acacia tree after death" to the story of the martyrdom of Han Ping and his wife that was widely circulated at that time. As the Han Empire expanded to the south, the northern literati began to come into contact with the red beans made of trees in the south. Liu Xi, who lived in South China at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, recorded that there was a large tree called "Acacia" in Fujian at that time, "in fact, it was as red as coral, and it remained unchanged over the years." Probably at that time, people put the legend of the acacia tree told by the northern literati on the peacock bean, and its beans began to be cherished and preserved and given to each other.
Valentine's Day on February 14, associated with roses, is a very late custom, and it was only after the 14th century that people began to use St. Valentine's Day as a festival and gradually associated with roses. I guess it was after the Renaissance in the 15th century that Europeans rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman culture that they remembered to symbolize love with the red rose, which spread around the world with the mass media of the 20th century.
February 14 is not a universal Valentine's Day in Europe. In Spain, for example, I saw Catalans in Barcelona refer to sant jordi on April 23 as Valentine's Day.
In the modern city of Shanghai in the 1930s, the rich purple rose, known as the "Foreign Moon Season", was an imported new european hybrid variety, and its symbolism spread along with the custom of Valentine's Day and became a symbol of fashion. Composer Chen Gexin created the song "Rose Rose I Love You" in 1935, and later not only became popular in the song hall on the beach, but also drifted to the United States after World War II, with a jazz interpretation version, and now many people think that this is an original Song of the United States.
However, roses, which today seem so "Western-style", one of the blood relatives is the flowers and trees of eastern and central Asia, including China, which have mixed the bloodlines of flowers called the moon season Chinese in the past two hundred years, and landed in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou in a western-style manner in the 20th century, creating a new trend.
For Europeans and Americans, Chinese so-called "rose" and "moon season" and "rose" belong to the rose genus of the rose family, and more than 250 varieties of the rose genus are collectively referred to as "rose" abroad - in modern times Chinese translated as "rose". But in the ancient Chinese books and even now, there are many people who habitually call the varieties that can bloom many times a year, the flowers are large, the leaves are bright, the branches are thick and thorny, and the single variety is called the moon season; the smallest flower and the bush are called roses; the flowers are centered, the leaves are no bright, the leaves are thorny, and the fragrance and essence can be emitted are called "roses". Perhaps the most important difference is that the ancient Chinese said that roses bloom only once a year.
However, when some rose flowers and trees in Europe and the United States were introduced to China in the early 20th century and translated as "roses", the traditional Chinese distinction between "roses" and "moon seasons" began to fail, and everyone gradually called the common flowers large and colorful flowers roses.
Twenty years ago, no one thought that roses represented love, and "Valentine's Day" was just a "foreign custom" in newspapers and books. However, after 1992, Valentine's Day became more and more popular in the big cities, and with the mass media spread throughout the country.
As the French scholar Jean Baudrillard said, consumers in modern society buy more about the differences in the meaning and meaning of goods than the function of concrete things. Through the "fashion ceremony" brought by the Foreign Festival of Valentine's Day, the meaning of flowers and trees is transformed into new values, and "rose" is thus separated from the local name of "Moon Season", becoming a new symbol jointly pursued by the urban fashion group, and then slowly spread to a larger level through newspapers and television.
3. Why are different trees called Bodhi trees?
The most famous bodhi tree in the world (ficus religiosa) is in India, in Bodh Gaya.
Shakyamuni's enlightenment under the tree brought new paths of life to thousands of believers in future generations.
This even affects our daily life, Chinese the custom of eating Lapa porridge on the eighth day of the first lunar month, because the sheep milk porridge rice offered by the shepherd girl Sugata nourished the Buddha's flesh, so later generations of Buddhists cooked porridge for the Buddha on the day of buddhahood, and gradually evolved into the folk custom of eating lapa porridge.
It is said that the Bodhi tree was first introduced to The Wangyuan Temple (Guangxiao Temple) in Guangzhou by the Indian monk Sanzang Navigation during the reign of Emperor Wu of Liang in 502. The Six Patriarchs of Zen Buddhism shaved their hair under this Bodhi tree, opened the Dongshan Dharma Gate, and wrote the famous verse: "Bodhi has no tree, nor is the mirror a platform." Originally there was nothing, where to stir up dust. "Unfortunately, the original tree was annihilated in the Song Dynasty, and now the one behind the temple was replanted in the middle of the Qing Dynasty." At present, only Quanzhou Kaiyuan Temple and Guangzhou Liurong Temple in China have ancient Bodhi trees.
According to the Old Book of Tang, the magatar state in northern India sent envoys to pay tribute to the Tang emperor in Chang'an. However, the tropical tree species of Bodhi tree cannot grow in the north, and the Bodhi trees in the two botanical gardens in Beijing so far - gifted by politicians in India and Sri Lanka respectively - can only live in greenhouses, so most of the "Bodhi Tree" written by the Central Plains poets of the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties is out of misunderstanding and cultural imagination, and is not necessarily related to the real Bodhi tree.
For example, the Tang Dynasty poet Pi Rixiu wrote that the "Bodhi Tree" of the Guoqing Temple in Tiantai Mountain, Zhejiang Province, is not a tropical plant of india, but a temperate linden tree. The "misidentification" of the monks of Mount Tendai spread overseas, and even temples in Japan and Korea regarded the linden tree as a bodhi tree. In Beijing, the two lime trees in the courtyard of the Yinghua Hall of the Forbidden City have also been taken seriously by the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties as "Bodhi Trees" for centuries, and several poems have been written.
Chinese's misidentification of the Linden tree is also reflected in cultural exchanges and translations, such as the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, some people called Berlin's "linter den linden" (Linter den linden), and even the Germans used the flowers and leaves of the linden tree to brew tea "der lindentee" in China was also translated as "Bodhi Tea". In fact, the climate in Germany and most of Europe is similar to that of northern China, and it is impossible to plant linden trees in the open air.
This misidentification is not only an intellectual misalignment, but also a cultural "misunderstanding" - either the Japanese who first traveled to Berlin in modern times mistook berlin's linden tree as a Bodhi tree, and then this saying spread to China; or those Jiangnan students who studied in Berlin in the early days saw that the linden tree in Berlin looked the same as the so-called "Bodhi tree" commonly seen in his hometown temple, and called this street "Bodhi Tree Under the Street".
In China, almost all the temples from the south to the north have their own "Bodhi Tree", the Linden Tree and the Wuzi Tree of the Jiangnan Temple, the Ginkgo Tree of the Yellow River Basin, as long as it is an ancient and tall tree, it is commonly known as the "Bodhi Tree", and the Tar Temple in Qinghai simply uses a kind of syringa reticulata as the "West Sea Bodhi".
4. Sycamore and plane: the romance of misunderstanding
Contemporary romance novels, movies often have lovers strolling under the shade of "French plane tree", for modern Chinese, "France" and "Paris" represent a modern new century, combined with passionate love, forming a romantic world where privacy and public space are combined, with a vivid sense of picture and rich cultural implications.
Curiously, botanists have examined that the scientific name of the "French sycamore" on the streets of many Chinese cities, such as Shanghai and Nanjing, is called "platanus×acerifolia), which was introduced to China in modern times, and the "sycamore" seen by poets of the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties has little to do with plant taxonomy: the origin is China, Japan's sycamore (firmiana simplex) is a deciduous tree of the sycamore family, which is the so-called "tung" of the same name "French plane" and oil tung (Euphorbiaceae) and Paulownia (Phylloscopidae) are not related, but ordinary people call it "tung" because of their similarity in trunks and leaves.
The "French plane tree" on the street and the plane tree in the Chinese classical courtyard have become the objects of mutual refraction between the two worlds, or in other words, the grafting of an alien tree on the traditional Chinese artistic conception.
The sycamore tree with auspicious meaning has long been a kind of garden tree, the Royal Shanglin Garden of the Han Dynasty has three kinds of "chair trees, sycamores, and jingtongs", and scholars in the Wei and Jin Dynasties often write about the posture of the sycamores in the courtyard, and the emperor of the Former Qin Dynasty, Jian Jian, is "a phoenix that does not inhabit the sycamore, does not eat bamboo, but plants hundreds of thousands of trees in Afang City to wait." Even in the Ming and Qing dynasties, Yiyuan also had the "Biwuqi Phoenix" pavilion, and the Humble Administrator's Garden also matched sycamores and green bamboo in the "Wuzhu Hermitage". Ancient legends say that the plane is a male tree, the tree is a female tree, the plane tree depends on each other for life and death, and the plane tree branches are straight, the roots are deep and leafy, which can symbolize loyalty and love. In "Peacock Flying Southeast", there is "east and west planted pine cypress, left and right planted sycamore." Branches covered, leaves and leaves communicate".
Since the Tang Dynasty, the sycamore has often been associated with the rain, Bai Juyi's "Long Hate Song" in "Spring wind peach plum blossoms, autumn rain sycamore leaves fall" is the precursor, the Southern Tang Dynasty lord Li Yu from the "spring hall concubines and fish through the line" of the emperor life fell to "lonely sycamore, deep courtyard lock Qingqiu" idle people, inevitably sentimental. After him, the famous Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao became even more resentful, and the sycamore and plantain had to be in close contact with the raindrops, and the decay of the fallen leaves and the sound of the falling rain intertwined with endless sorrow and desolation.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the scientific name of the "French sycamore" was "two-ball plane tree". In the 17th century, the Spaniards planted three-ball plane wood and platanus occidentalis (also known as tung) from the Americas in a similar place, and accidentally crossed the two-ball plane tree.
The Scottish horticulturist William Aiton called it "Spanish planewood" when he first described the plant in English in 1789. In the 19th century, the two-ball plane tree became popular in London as a garden landscape plant and urban greenery plant, so English and some other Western languages called it "London plane tree".
Since 1902, the French began to plant this "London plane tree" on Huaihai Road, and the people of Shanghai saw that it was introduced by the French, so they called it "French plane tree". During the Republic of China period, Shanghai was the most modern city in China, and the Shanghainese called it the French sycamore, and the people of the whole country copied it. After Nanjing became the capital of the Nationalist government, urban planners also introduced a large number of French plane trees, and then a ball of plane tree (Mei Tong) was also introduced, so now many cities in the north and south have both two-ball plane trees and one-ball plane trees.
Interestingly, the earliest plane tree introduced in China came from India 1600 years ago: in 401 AD, the Indian monk Kumarosh came to China to spread Buddhism, bringing three-ball plane trees planted in front of the ancient temple in Huxian County, Shaanxi Province, so the tree got its name Kumarosh tree, but unfortunately it died in the 1950s, and now there are only small trees that were replanted later. The Kumarosh tree has been quiet in the small county for thousands of years and has not been widely introduced—even the street trees in Xi'an are "French plane trees" and "beautiful trees".
The different fates of the Kumarosh tree and the "French plane tree" are caused by the difference between the two modes of transmission, whether the tree species brought by the Buddhist missionary can be widely spread depends on personal strength and a series of accidental factors, and the french plane tree entering China can be said to be driven by the economic system and the urban management knowledge system: the street tree, which is related to the overall mechanism design of the urban planning and road system established in modern times, and the trees popular on the boulevards in London and Paris have thus been introduced to the Shanghai concession. Cover the newly opened road with its neat green leaves.
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