Lapis Lazuli

In a recent post on these pages – see here – we felt moved to defend the colour blue from those reckless deconstructionists who propagate the bogus assertion that people of earlier eras could not distinguish such a colour. The argument, we explained, is in large measure a linguistic one. One of the languages often cited in this regard is Chinese where the word qing refers to either blue or to green, which is to say that Chinese has no distinct word for blue (or for green). Instead, blue is usually regarded as a shade of green – or is it that green is regarded as a shade of blue? In any case, quite reasonably, the Chinese see blue and green on the same scale. We might also say that yellow and brown are on the same scale, or that red and orange are on the same scale. There is no justification for supposing that people could not see such colours, only that their mode of differentiating them, the words they use, is different to our own. 

In another recent post – see here – these pages also took occasion to celebrate the extensive use of the colour vermillion – or cinnabar – in the Chinese tradition, and especially in sacred contexts such as Taoist temples. Chinese red (vermillion) is not merely lucky to the Chinese, we explained, but actually sacred, and has attained this status from the strongly alchemical themes of the Chinese tradition.

In this current post we celebrate a special application of a shade of blue in the same tradition – the Chinese love of and extensive use of that rich shade of blue usually referred to as ultramarine but which is more accurately described as lapis lazuli, since it is from that semi-precious stone that the colour was traditionally derived. The stone has been mined in eastern Afghanistan for thousands of years and its use spread to China eastwards and to the Levant and ancient Egypt westwards along the great east/west trade routes. In this case, however, it is mainly associated with the Boodhist tradition in China, rather than Taoism, and so also features in Tibetan colour schemes. 

As the present author has remarked in recent posts, entering the Sino-Asiatic world brings one into contact with a flood of vermillion. But it also means encounters with lapis lazuli in the iconography and colourings of temples under Boodhist influence. It is not a colour that features in the temples of the Hindoos. We encounter it instead among the Tibetan Boodhists and then by extension throughout China. The Chinese, we must say, developed a particular love for it. It is a distinctly Chinese blue. 

The Boodha of healing is often shown in lapis lazuli, as above. 

Simplistic accounts will tell you that blue is the ‘colour of death’ in the Chinese tradition, and that it is counted as ‘unlucky’. This is clearly not the case for lapis lazuli (ultramarine) which is, rather, counted as celestial in its significance. It is a heavenly colour. Moreover, just as vermillion (cinnabar) is associated with gold mining, raw lapis lazuli is flecked with gold – like stars – which further underlines its celestial symbolism. In Christian iconography, the outer garment of the Virgin Mary where she is ‘Queen of Heaven’ is thus cast in ultramarine as well.

The pictures on this page are from the great Chinese Boodhist temple at Air Itam south of George Town on the Prince of Wales island. This is by far the largest and most opulent temple complex on Pe Nang. It is situated at a location at the foot of Pe Nang Hill that the Chinese have long regarded as having especially potent feng sui. 

Much of the temple – officially called Kek Lok Si – was initially funded by the illustrious XIXth century Chinese tycoon Cheong Fatt Tze, one of the most famous residents of George Town. His old estate is still extant and is now unofficially known locally as the ‘Blue Mansion’ since Mr Cheong had a particular love of lapis lazuli and painted his mansion accordingly. He had a deep and very Chinese love of this particular blue (even if it was referred to using the same word as green.) The traditional Chinese world features lapis lazuli. Ultramarine - symbolic of heaven - features in traditional Chinese colour symbolism. Readers can find pictures of the ‘Blue Mansion’ in George Town below. 

Finally, in yet another recent post - see here - these pages celebrated the work of Mr William Butler Yeats, describing him as one of the finest poets of the English language in the modern era. The subject of this present page gives us cause to recall one of his very finest poems, Lapis Lazuli, in which the poet contemplates a Chinese statue made of the stone, and which poem is reproduced for the edification of readers as follows:

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.

Every discolouration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

* * * 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Views of a Chinese Graveyard

In the hilly region towards the centre of the Prince of Wales Island – or Pe Nang as it is called – is the old town of Bilak Pulau. Stranded there an entire afternoon awaiting return buses to George Town the present author wandered into the surrounding jungle and about three miles out of town encountered an old traditional Chinese cemetery. The photographs on this page are views of the cemetery, the graves and the funerary art from that site, along with a few rudimentary notes on the symbolism of Chinese graves. 

The Chinese constitute an ethnic majority in modern Pe Nang – the only area of the Malay peninsula or the Malacca Straits where they do so – and have been an established community for many centuries. Although there are a few graves from recent times, this cemetery is from an older era and is the burial place of many of the progenitors and ancestors of the illustrious Chinese clans who still populate the island. These were Chinese – mainly from southern China – who ventured to the Straits in search of fortune, or at least a better life. 

Although remote and buried in forest, the cemetery is still tended. In the photos shown on this page readers will notice the profusion of slips of paper strewn all about; this is from a recent festival in which graves are decorated with messages to the dead, as in this instance:

The remarkable thing about traditional Chinese graves is their shape. In contrast to the boxed rectilinear graves of Europeans, they are almost always semi-circular in shape, or what is often described as 'horseshoe' shaped, or else the shape of the Greek letter omega. The deceased is buried with the head at the top of this curved shape and so the "head stone" is actually where the feet are. Burial is usually quite shallow - compared to the mandatory six feet of the european grave - and so a tumulus or mound is usually shaped over the area inside the omega/horseshoe. The grave therefore is elevated above ground level.

There is much discussion about the significance and meaning of the curved burial plot, although very little of it is informative or sensible. As with nearly all things Chinese, readers will find an abundance of reports stating that the shape is regarded as "lucky" and is designed to bring "good luck" to the deceased in the afterlife. This tells us nothing. 

More useful are accounts that tell us that the shape is developed from the theories and practices of feng sui - Chinese geomancy - where it is considered beneficial for the dead to be buried in a valley or a concave formation of hills; where this is lacking then the grave itself is mounded up and shaped accordingly. This is evident in the graveyard depicted here. It is, as it happens, on a western-facing hillside that conforms in part to the feng sui requirements, and clearly individual graves have been shaped into small hills to accentuate the natural lay of the earth in an appropriate way. 

Other accounts of the omega/horseshoe grave remark upon the fact that sometimes the tumulus is decorated like a tortoise shell, and so the entire construction seems to allude to the shape of a tortoise. Why? Because, we are again told, "tortoises are good luck." Certainly, but why? The key idea is that the tortoise shell is cosmological. This is a very common symbolism found throughout Chinese cosmology (and the Chinese tradition is strongly cosmological.) The symbolism concerns an over-arching shell such as the sky is supposed to be in traditional cosmological understandings. The grave then becomes a microcosm of the world. There is, however, also the fact that tortoises, according to legend, are supposed to seek out a suitable (re: "lucky") place to die. By making the grave tortoise-like it becomes - by extension - a good place for the dead to be buried. It is, in any case, all about a suitable location. For the traditional Chinese the location of the grave is paramount. 

What most accounts of Chinese burial practices neglect to mention, though, is that - very obviously - the shape of the traditional grave is uterine. The earth is a womb. The grave is the uterus. The dead await rebirth (either by resurrection or in the Pureland - Chinese accounts of the afterlife are diverse.) The shapes and curves of the Chinese grave are, in any case, distinctly feminine. This is the deepest, most primordial and most important symbolism. Compared to the utilitarian Western burial box (coffin) the Chinese grave is distinctly anatomical and the curved shapes emphasise the idea of the earth as womb, the living earth, which is the key underlying metaphor of geomancy. Chinese burial practices are above all geomantic. This fact is on display everywhere in a traditional Chinese cemetery. We will hopefully have occasion to explore this further at a later date. 

Note the semi-circular "forecourt" in front of the grave marker and the lines of salt that families draw at various points around grounds along with offerings to the dead. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Murals & Street Art of Penang

The instinct to use walls and other public spaces in an urban environment for art and decoration is a sound one. The alternative to such an art is graffiti, a vacuum that invites the ugly urban illegible 'rap' scribbling or else the talentless and dreary stencilling of subversive and grubby vermin such as the stupidly named “Banksy”. It is far better to lend public spaces to muralists and competent artists in the hope of developing a genuine public art. 

This has been the strategy in George Town and in other towns across the Prince of Wales Island where the present author currently resides. The island is home to a beautiful heritage architecture which is, thankfully, almost free of the scourge of graffiti. The island's walls and alleyways are remarkably clean. Instead, the art community of the island has taken blank walls and adorned them with impressive mural work and other forms of engaging street art. 

Much of it, admittedly, is of the representational and illusionistic type – a failing of imagination to which muralists everywhere are prone. The mistake is to regard a wall simply as a screen upon which one projects an image, or else to dissolve the wall with an illusion of depth  - as if making an image large is a statement in itself and as if a wall is not a very different space than a canvas (a "window") that accordingly demands a very different type of art. A proper mural art respects the solidity of the building (and is therefore largely two-dimensional) while developing a communal vocabulary of motifs, patterns and decorations befitting a public art. It is never is personal indulgence. 

We must admit that other countries – notably some parts of Latin America – have developed richer and more impressive traditions of public art, but in those cases it is largely a politically motivated art along with all the limitations that implies. 

The murals of George Town, Bilak Palau and other areas of the Prince of Wales Island are impressive and charming, are a credit to the local art community, and are much loved by tourists. Most of them (but not all!) are tasteful and most add to and enhance rather than scar and detract from the old architecture and the urban ambience of the old city areas. Some are witty, some are playful, some are lovely, many - a developed theme - celebrate the traditional crafts and occupations of the Chinese and other inhabitants of the island and so have an element of the heroic.

Readers will find examples of the street art of Pe Nang below:

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Saffron Colonial - British Colonial Cuisine

A new café and bakery opened in Portland Oregon recently, catching this writer’s attention, even though he currently resides a thousand miles away. The new establishment has become notorious and is subject to media reports because it is the victim of on-going protests from leftist Thought Police who have taken exception to its theme: British colonial food. The restaurateurs are qualified chefs with extensive training and experience in fine restaurants in Paris and elsewhere and who happen to specialize in the diverse cuisines of the British empire. They have a deep professional interest in the historical synthesis of British foods with the more exotic fare of  the many lands that were once under British imperial dominion. Their restaurant, Saffron Colonial Café, at 4120 North Williams Ave, Portland, has a menu constructed around this theme, along with appropriate furnishings and decorations.

This, however, is simply too much for local Leftists. They have organized petitions and pickets and have taken to confronting and harassing customers on the grounds that all things to do with the British Empire are odious and taboo. The menu is simply too politically incorrect. They have urged the owners to change the name of the place and to eradicate all references to the Evil Empire from the menu. Thus far the owners have resisted. It is in celebration of this feat of brave resistance to leftist bullying that this page is devoted to promoting Saffron Colonial. 

Of course, the present author has not had the pleasure of enjoying either the ambience or the food, but would love to if ever he ventures to Portland. This post is a sort of endorsement in absentia. The fusion of British-influence with local cuisine has been a constant delight in his recent travels. British food on its own, to be frank, has a well-deserved reputation as bland, stodgy and uninspiring, but if you pepper this with the tastes of Hindoostan, or Ceylon, or the Malay Peninsula, it comes to life. The imperial experience has certainly done the British table some good. Conversely, native cuisine is often tamed and broadened and given both body and finesse by exposure to colonial tastes.

The self-indulgent intolerant stupidity of trying to close down a restaurant because it serves British food is yet another example of the political decay of American leftist culture and needs no further comment. We are happy to report, instead, that the reviews for Saffron Colonial are good. Leftist trolls have attempted to sabotage the review pages, but professional review sites such as Yelp have managed to filter them out. Reviews, with pictures, links and samples of the menu follow:

You can visit Saffrom Colonial online at:

Saffron Colonial

And the menu is here:

Saffron Colonial Menu

If you are in Portland, and feeling peckish, ignore the line of angry, unhappy Leftists in the street and venture in to enjoy the food, fine tea and pleasant company. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

On Octagons

As reported in a previous post – here – the moment one ventures from the Indian world into the Chinese world one is confronted by a wash of the lucky colour red. Red, or more correctly vermillion, or cinnabar, is the colour of the Chinese and Chinese-influenced traditions. It is very conspicuous. It is everywhere. And along with it, also conspicuous, is the profusion of eight-sided figures, octagons, within the Sino-Asiatic order. They are nowhere to be seen in Hindoo temples, nor in Boodhist temples even though Boodhism features an eightfold path – this takes the form of the eight-spoked Dharma Wheel in typical Boodhist iconography. The octagon, however – the eight-sided plain figure with or without an eight-pointed star – is conspicuously Chinese. 

The author of these pages is currently resident in the old city of George Town on the Prince of Wales Island, the only city in Malaysia that boasts a Chinese majority. A feature of the old city is the beautiful temples and clan houses, some of them very extensive and sumptuous, some very old. They are among the best Taoist and Confucian temples outside of China proper. Chinese from both Formosa and the mainland travel to George Town to visit them. It is a major temple city and a major centre of traditional Chinese religion.

An immediately obvious feature of such temples, and the attending buildings, and the Chinese domestic terrace houses too, is the proliferation of octagonal forms – tile designs, floor patterns, sacred insignia, altar iconography, and so on. The Chinese “lucky colour” is vermillion. The “lucky number”, as the Chinese will tell you, is eight. Sets of eight, preferably arranged in octagonal forms, are considered auspicious. It is by far the most common geometrical motif in traditional Chinese decoration.

Below are a few examples of octagonal forms to be seen around George Town. Some of the roads feature large octagonal designs and octagonal tile designs are everywhere to be seen. The geometrical tiles themselves were originally imported from Sheffield by the British, but the Chinese were so taken by them – such is their love of the octagonal pattern - that they adopted them as a standard feature of their homes, temples and pathways. The present author has noted the tile patterns of George Town - one of the most striking and beautiful features of the old city - in a previous post here.

 

Octagons feature as a design on several streets in George Town old city. 

Design on the wall of the Chinese clan association building in George Town

Octagonal tile patterns found throughout George Town

What, though, is the significance of the octagon, both in principle and specifically to the Chinese? It is, of course, not exclusive to the Chinese tradition; it does feature in the symbolism of other traditional orders as well, but nowhere so extensively. In the occidental order we find it the symbolic form of baptism. Several famous baptistries, such as that in Florence, are octagonal, and – a residual continuation of the same symbolism - baptistimal fonts in Catholic and some Anglican and Lutheran churches. Amongst Christians, though, it is a form more typical of the Eastern churches where it occurs naturally with a sacred architecture featuring a dome atop of rectilinear understorey. 

This is the form appropriated from the Byzantine Christians by the Mahometans when they built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem – perhaps the most impressive octagonal building in the world. It was possibly from this inspiration that Emperor Frederick – who had seen the Dome of the Rock during the Crusades - built his mysterious octagonal folly, the Castel de Monte, in southern Italy. All the same, these architectural examples are exceptions. The octagon is not as conspicuous as a symbol in the occidental world as it is in the orient. It occurs naturally in Mahometan geometrical patterns, but there it is not imbued with the same symbolic value – marked as “auspiciousness” – that we find among the Chinese. 

The Castel del Monte

Basically, the symbolism of the octagon is this: it is an intermediate form between the circle (of heaven) and the square (of earth). Its primary meaning therefore is: regeneration. It signals: the square that returns to the circle. That is, it consists of two superimposed squares which are in the process of returning into a circular form. Thus the association with baptism: the rite of regeneration. In the Chinese (which is to say Taoist) context, though – and this is quite apart from its correspondences with the eight trigrams of the I Ching and other symbolic parallels such as the eight directions – the signification of regeneration is overtly alchemical. 

As with the colour red, the meaning behind the “luck” the Chinese associate with the symbol is to be understood via the strongly alchemical nature of the Chinese order. Alchemy concerns exactly this: regeneration. The regeneration of matter into spirit (if we are to describe it dualistically). The regeneration of base metals into gold. In the octagon, the square (matter, earth) is regenerating into the circle (spirit, heaven). It is for this reason that it finds such a prominent place in the Chinese tradition – it is the pre-eminent (stable) expression of the doctrine of alchemical regeneration, which is the core theme of Chinese spirituality. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

In Defence of the Colour Blue

The internet is a sad, lonely world where people will grasp at any novelty to stir them from digital ennui. Recently – or actually it has been over the last several years – a story has kept resurfacing in various internet journals, blogs, social media outlets and “memes” (whatever a “meme” might be) that is supposed to tantalize readers and viewers with the improbable assertion that the colour blue is a modern invention. It is a novelty story in the “stranger-than-fiction” category designed to brighten the dull days of the world-weary. 

The story, which takes several forms, appeared yet again in a recent edition of ‘Business Insider’ – exactly the sort of content you would expect to find in ‘Business Insider’! - under the heading NO ONE COULD SEE THE COLOUR BLUE UNTIL MODERN TIMES. It was thereafter reposted by well-meaning but bored individuals who were taken in by the headline, and thus it began yet another round of self-perpetuating appearances on the world wide web as it slowly but surely insinuated itself into the daily conversation of the digital class and twitterati. It soon became an item of received wisdom. People who should know better started coming up to you saying “Did you know that no one could see the colour blue until modern times?” 

In the ‘Business Insider’ article we are told:

Ancient languages didn't have a word for blue - not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew. And without a word for the color, there's evidence that they may not have seen it at all.

This, really, is the crux of the whole matter. It is a linguistic argument. Someone has claimed that words for blue are missing in old languages and since there was no word for it then people in olden times must not have been able to see the colour at all – as unlikely as that might be. No other evidence for this proposal is on offer, except for some extremely dubious experiments with an obscure Namibian tribe who, apparently, have trouble distinguishing between blue and green. This leads to the logical leap that asserts that the colour blue is a modern invention, a recent social construction (you know, like gender.) As the ‘Business Insider’ puts it:

Before blue became a common concept, maybe humans saw it. But it seems they didn't know they were seeing it.

And they ask:

If you see something yet can't see it, does it exist?

We arrive at the real point of the story: the tiresome trope that knowledge is socially constructed. We have the physical receptors to see the colour blue, sure enough, and we can safely assume that ancient people did too, but if there is no corresponding construct of knowledge (which is purely subjective and has no necessary correlation to objective facts) then it may as well have not existed at all. We make reality. Reality is a social construct, a gentleman’s agreement, and nothing more.

A story as absurd as this should give us reason to pause. The moment one encounters a headline such as NO ONE COULD SEE THE COLOUR BLUE UNTIL MODERN TIMES one should immediately suspect that it is a piece of post-modern relativist twaddle, and, indeed, so it turns out to be. It is a good example of how post-modern intellectualism operates. Typically, you take some flimsy linguistic evidence and add to it some half-baked anthropological study of a colour-retarded tribe no one has ever heard of - the exception that disproves the rule - and use it to demolish one of the most obvious standards of common sense. It is disconcerting and it is intended to be. If even the colours we see are invented, if they are just social constructs, then every thing we ever held to be normal or true about ourselves and our world is open to question since it is probably equally false as well.

As it happens, though, this particular exercise in post-modern absurdity is easy to refute. It is extraordinary that we should hesitate to think otherwise. Is it true that ancient languages had no word for the colour blue? Of course not. It is demonstrable nonsense. Could pre-modern people see the colour blue. Of course they could. 

The roots of this nonsense lie in the late XIXth century. The entire idea is a ludicrous falsity first proposed by the British Prime Minister Gladstone. It has since been taken up, extended, amplified and digitalized into an internet phenomenon. 

Gladstone, readers should be aware, is the most odious Prime Minister in British history prior to Tony Blair. This is the man who turned British foreign policy against the Ottomans and embraced the family of Ibn Saud. This is the man who, as Prime Minister, would often take to the back streets of London and lecture prostitutes on Christian morality. In his student days, it seems, he once sat down and trawled through the epic poems of Homer noting references to various colours. An unimaginative simpleton, he was perturbed by the famous Homeric description of the “wine-dark sea”. Why “wine-dark”? Did Homer not know that the sea is blue? Never mind the tradition that Homer was, in fact, blind. It was Mr Gladstone – a counter of instances - who first determined that Homer lacked a word for blue. What about the Greek word “cyan” one wonders? Gladstone overlooked that. He hit upon the theory that the Greeks could not see the colour blue. (Apparently, by the same reasoning, they didn't defacte either, since Homer makes no mention of toilets. The old 'argument from silence' fallacy.) Gladstone was not only politically loathsome, he was dim as well. 

Getting more to the point, what, let us ask, about the very many instances of surviving works of Greek art - not to mention Minoan and Egyptian and others - that feature blue enamel or traces thereof? These alone demolish the entire case. Mr Gladstone - not an artistic sort of soul - overlooked that too. Is there no evidence of early people using the colour blue in art work? Of course there is! An abundance of it! 

It is true that the earliest cave art tends to lack the colour blue, but that is purely because permanent blue dyes are relatively rare in nature, difficult to procure, difficult to make and quick to fade. All the same, one can find plenty of blue in ancient art. Is it really necessary to show examples of it in order to expose Mr Gladstone’s theory as the nonsense it is? See the pictures on this page. Mr Gladstone was a vicious political revisionist, a toady, a self-righteous moral puritan and a literal-minded philistine who could see no better purpose for the texts of Homer than to count instances of adjectives – and that, badly. That is where this whole story comes from. The idea that the Greeks - and by extension other noble people of ancient times - could not see the colour blue should be known as Gladstone's folly. 

Regrettably, we still live with the disastrous realignments of British foreign policy first made by Mr Gladstone, and now it seems we must endure his ridiculous undergraduate theory about colours as well. After all, let us recall that, as well as knowledge, stupidity is also socially constructed. The story that no one could see the colour blue before the modern era is itself a social construction and reveals much about the forlorn age in which we live. That anyone – anyone! – could even countenance such a headline is testament to just how eager we are today for some new stimulation, some novelty to shake us from our jaded seen-it-all-already post-modern lethargy.  We are now so prepared to dismiss common sense, so prepared to throw away every eternal verity, so ready to believe that the entire testimony of the human race heretofore is bunk, that we will entertain even the most ridiculous of propositions. Is it true that ancient people could not see the colour blue? The correct answer to such a question is: Don't be stupid. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black