Color in Chinese culture

Chinese culture attaches certain values to colours, like which colours are considered auspicious (吉利) or inauspicious (不利). The Chinese word for "colour" is yánsè (顏色). In Classical Chinese, the character sè (色) more accurately meant "colour in the face", or "emotion". It was generally used alone and often implied sexual desire or desirability. During the Tang Dynasty, the word yánsè came to mean 'all colour'. A Chinese idiom with the meaning “many colours” or “multi-coloured”, Wǔyánliùsè (五顏六色), can also mean 'colours' in general. In Chinese mythology, the goddess, Nüwa, is said to have mended the Heavens after a disaster destroyed the original pillars that held up the skies, using five coloured-stones in these five auspicious colours to patch-up the crumbling heavens, accounting for the many colours that the skies can take-on. In traditional Chinese art and culture, black, red, qing (青) (a conflation of the idea of green and blue), white and yellow are viewed as standard colors. These colors correspond to the five elements (五行) of water, fire, wood, metal and earth, taught in traditional Chinese physics. Throughout the Shang, Tang, Zhou and Qin dynasties, China's emperors used the Theory of the Five Elements to select colors. Other colors were considered by Confucius as 'inferior'. Yellow of a golden hue is considered the most beautiful and prestigious color. The Chinese conception of yellow (, huáng) is inclusive of many shades considered tan or brown in English and the primary association is with the earth rather than the sun. The Chinese saying Yellow generates Yin and Yang implies that yellow is the center of everything. Associated with but ranked above brown, yellow signifies neutrality and good luck. Yellow is sometimes paired with red in place of gold. The Yellow River is the cradle of Chinese civilisation. Yellow was the emperor's color in Imperial China and is held as the symbolic color of the five legendary emperors of ancient China, such as the Yellow Emperor.

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Related concepts (3)

Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year is the festival that celebrates the beginning of a new year on the traditional lunisolar Chinese calendar. In Chinese, the festival is commonly referred to as the Spring Festival () as the spring season in the lunisolar calendar traditionally starts with lichun, the first of the twenty-four solar terms which the festival celebrates around the time of the Chinese New Year. Marking the end of winter and the beginning of the spring season, observances traditionally take place from Chinese New Year's Eve, the evening preceding the first day of the year, to the Lantern Festival, held on the 15th day of the year.

Yellow Emperor

The Yellow Emperor, also known as the Yellow Thearch or by his Chinese name Huangdi (ˈhwɑːŋ_ˈdiː), is either an individual deity (shen) in Chinese religion, one of the legendary Chinese sovereigns and cultural heroes included among the mytho-historical Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, or a part of the Five Regions' Highest Deities (). Calculated by Jesuit missionaries, who based their work on various Chinese chronicles, and later accepted by the twentieth-century promoters of a universal calendar starting with the Yellow Emperor, Huangdi's traditional reign dates are 2697–2597 or 2698–2598 BC.