Ume show at Century park [世纪公园梅花展]
Plum blossom (Prunus mume) is a special kind of flower, not only can it survive winter, but it needs coldness to blossom. This particular characteristic gives it a unique status among the flower lovers, especially Chineses, for its persistence in the hard and cold weather. I just think that the English name plum blossom is so terrible, for its total lack of sexyness and romantic when you try to pronounce that word, so I prefer to call it the unofficial way, ume, like the Japanese way. At least that sounds closer to the Chinese words mei hua [梅花]. When you think about it, is there any flower name that sounds sexy in English? I couldn’t think of one! No wonder Shakespeare stands alone against Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau, Balzac, Hugo, etc.***
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Ume is representative of Chinese culture just as sakura is representative of Japanese culture, or tulip of the Hollands’. Countless paints and litteratures were devoted to worship ume by Chinese artists, ancien and contemporary. China is now the absolute authority in ume specie, anyone of any country who wants to submit a new ume specie has to bring it to the Chinese authority to certify that that is indeed an authentic new specie.
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During the long and cold winter, many parks in China expose ume to attract tourists as that is the only thing that could show some vivid colors during this season. So, we went to visit the Century park yesterday afternoon as team building activity. I brought my camera to work but not sure if I would use it, since the weather was quite lousy at the morning. But by noon, the sun showed up, blue sky and warm weather, it was as good as I could hope, and the resulting photos were quite satisfying as far as my expectation is concerned. This is the first time I use my Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 macro lens to shoot flower, the ergonomic and end result is quite impressive, I think I’ll use it more often from now on.
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Click here to see the whole album.
*** For much of the first millennium of the Anglo-Saxon’s world, there has been wars and wars and wars, leaving very little time and manpower for these barbaric and pagan tribes to develop art and litterature, then at first half of the second millennium they were conquered by Normans and French, who, thanks God, brought them christianity, latinized their language and took their society a step closer to civilization. Otherwise they would still be stuck with an aweful language that no one would want to learn, let alone being adopted by the world.
For the brief period that they dominated the world, most of their greatest men were sent to the farthest lands of the empire to brutalize people, drug people, corrupt governments and steal wealth to enrich the Queen, while at the same time they hallucinated themselves into the idea that they were a civilization of gentlemen and the others were barbaric. It’s more ironic when you think about the fact that most of the people brutalized by the British Empire had a much longer history as a civilized society than any gentleman can imagine, be it the Indian, the Arab, the Chinese or any South Asia people, with the notable exception of Australian and Canadian.
And now that the American Empire has taken over the reign to teach the old civilizations to behave in the new democratic and globalized era, we can only expect that same irony to take on exponential scale, and let’s leave the art and litterature to other people to develop, as Anglo-Saxons are always too busy to fight and kill and steal, and yet still pretend to be civilized and lawful!