Everybody visited Forbidden city may have noticed that there are a lot of
yellow and red elements in there; at the meantime, if you have some close
Chinese friends or you know some background of modern Chinese culture, you may have
heard yellow movie or yellow video, mean pornographic material. So, what is
going on?
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| Forbidden City in Air Photo |
(Photo Source: http://blog.voc.com.cn/blog_showone_type_blog_id_600426_p_1.html)
Right, let’s look the developing track of yellow color in Chinese
culture, and the controversial reality.
As illustrated in the other post about the traditional color
in Yinyang and Wuxing Theory, yellow takes the largest area in the middle
and represents soil or land, the extension of this meaning is harmony and it
embraces everything and is the noblest color. Another name of Chinese is Generations
of Fire and Yellow Emperors. However, it took some generations to make yellow a
royal color. At the beginning, everybody could get access to yellow, until Sui
Dynasty when empires wore yellow dragon robes. In Song Dynasty, it was well
known that yellow represent royalty. It was regulated at that time that yellow
is exclusive to royal families, and ordinary people couldn’t even wear clothes
with yellow. At the meantime, different people in the royal family needed to
wear different tones of yellow to discriminate the identities, for instance,
king used the bright yellow, prince could only use reddish yellow, and other
princes use brownish yellow. In Ming and Qing dynasties, the yellow and red
colors were widely applied to forbidden cities, which you can see today.
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| Chinese Historical Dragon Robe |
Other than representing supreme imperial power, yellow was and
still is the superior color used in Buddhism. In Buddhism, yellow
represents moderation, the balance status of having and not-having. Buddha
statues are, in normal cases, are coated with golden color, or in gold. Gold,
valued partially by its rarity, is symbol of noble. In Buddhism, Buddha’s world
is golden world; it is clean as pure gold, peaceful and solemn. It is believed
by Buddhist that Siddhārtha Gautama, after his Buddhist practice, bear golden
light. Another saying is, in historical dynasties, Buddhism was highly
respected by royal, and thus yellow, which was deemed as royal-exclusive, was
rewarded to Buddhist.
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| Buddhist Statue |
Despite that fact that yellow was and is, in many cases, are color
of noble and solemn, it bear some indecent meanings in nowadays Chinese usage. Yellow
culture represents filthy and pornographic meanings, such as yellow video,
yellow photo etc. You can image that many Chinese scholars object the abuse of
Yellow in Chinese language. Studies suggested that the changes maybe strongly
related with two facts, the first one is that, yellow as royal-exclusive color
was deserved by revolutionist as symbol of feudal society; secondly, it is the
shadow of cultural invasion from western counties. In 1894, a journal was
created in England called Yellow Journal, which published decadent literatures
always having hints of erotic content. At the same time, some cheap novels were
using yellow as the covers. In USA, yellow (or erotic contents) were widely
used to gain advantages in newspaper competition at that point of time, which
was also known as “Era of Yellow News”. Bit by bit, these influences penetrated
into Chinese language and stayed since.
