Evolution and Analysis of Hand-held Flowers in Ancient China

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220401.015How to use a DOI?

Keywords

China; traditional flower arrangement; hand-held flower; eastern flower arrangement; bouquet; ancient times

Abstract

Traditional Chinese flower arrangement, as a part of China’s intangible cultural heritage, features unique Chinese cultural characteristics and styles of forms. A small number of studies on hand-held flower were scattered in the history of flower arrangement. This paper aims to briefly chronologize the development of hand-held flowers in ancient China, make comparison with its Western counterpart, analyze the influence of primitive religions and Buddhism on the development of Chinese hand-held flowers in the early days of ancient China, and discuss the situation when hand-held flowers progressed at a slow pace after the Song Dynasty because bottled flowers took up a proportion of the share of hand-held ones, leaving less chance and limited raw materials for the application of hand-held flowers. The West-East differences largely took place in the 17th-19th centuries, when the Western world entered the Renaissance and the industrial-social revolution, there were a tremendously large number of plants to choose from for hand-held flowers to be used on more occasions. These reasons, together with the advent of floriography (the language of flowers) accelerated the development of hand-held flowers. For China, the traditional hand-held flowers have been glittering with their unparalleled cultural charm for over 1000 years, and the special choice of woody plants in the design, the cultural traits of flowers’ symbolic meanings, and the distinctive attributes of bouquets used on Chinese folk festivals are believed to be the reasons. Therefore, contemporary-style bouquets can be arranged based on the convergence of Eastern and Western characteristics.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Lin Shi
AU  - Yanping Fan
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/04/08
TI  - Evolution and Analysis of Hand-held Flowers in Ancient China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 75
EP  - 80
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220401.015
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220401.015
ID  - Shi2022
ER  -