True Colors

     Bi shui lan tian is one of China’s most famous four character sayings. It is meant to embody the ideal picture of beauty and literally means ‘green water, blue sky.” I think this saying goes to show that the intellectuals who came up with these renowned, thousand-year-old images did not get many opportunities to venture out to the small villages of China’s southern minorities, but rather spent their lives locked up in the educated cities of imperial China.

     What they would have found to be the true beauty of these landscapes, known throughout China for their magnificence, is what lies in the intense, striking, myriad of colors that exist in complete purity between the green water and blue skies. The clear streams in each village, (although not always so clear) and the cloudless stretch of blue continuously above us, were mere frames to the incomparable beauty of the undiluted, deep colors that shocked my eyes each time I encountered them. That was, by far, the biggest difference I discovered between Beijing and the small villages and surrounding countryside of Guizhou and Yunnan.

     I remember very clearly the first time I was so taken aback by this sheer Color. It was in the first host village of the Han people, tucked away in a valley surrounded by the deep, green mountains of Guizhou province. My two little host sisters had taken us for a walk, following the little stream that ended just in front of our house up to the small waterfall which the villagers all described as the village’s most beautiful spot. Along the way we passed one of the many water mills where the men of the village all make their living- grinding chopped up bamboo with a big, wooden wheel, and then processing it into bamboo paper.

     I crossed the stream to the mill, and approached the open-aired, bamboo-stilted hut slowly so as not to attract the attention of the man busily sifting the bamboo slivers under the giant, wooden wheel that crushed them into fine threads. He was wearing the traditional Han indigo-blue shirt and darker blue trousers, whose colors were so pure and so deep that I could tell the villagers must have personally dyed them. In his hands was a bundle of the bright yellow bamboo straws, caught just right in the sunlight so that they gleamed like liquid gold. This striking blue and shining yellow, framed by the dull green vegetation of the mountain behind the old man, truly brought pleasure to my eyes. I had forgotten the power of bright Color on one’s eyes, and it made me remember how dulled and dusted even the flashy lights around Tiananmen had seemed with all the pollution in Beijing.

     This one image from the Han village was but an appetizer for what awaited my deprived eyes. Indeed, the Miao people must have had some understanding of Color’s power to intoxicate the eyes, for they greeted us with a feast of it. They were robed in bright, sky-blue satin robes, with black and gold and shiny jewels embroidered onto red sleeves, huge necklaces made with rings and rings of silver, and long colorful, embroidered scarves that hung down to their knees. Even their faces had been carefully but overly made-up, giving even the small children the reddest-red shiny lips and the rosiest pink circles for cheeks. But most remarkable of all, was their huge, horned, sliver crowns that dazzled and danced in the sunlight that reflected off them. The crowns were about twice the size of bearers’ heads, with silver horns towering four feet taller higher, and their considerable weight was made obvious later when the Miao women struggled to hold their heads up while doing light dance steps around drum. The drum was beautiful too, as high as a man’s shoulders and draped with different shades of pink cloths, made extraordinary by the sea of blue that danced around it.

     The deep blue, glistening yellow, and dazzling silver were very different from the thick, piercing red of the Dong village’s pig slaughter. Of course it wasn’t so heavy and violent of a color as it was trickling down the river where I saw the first pig get gutted and then bled. The purplish-black stains that were left in the dirt, dotted along the river’s edge where the stabbed pig had been dragged didn’t seem so strikingly red either. It was the orangey-red, thick hot sauce that sat on our table that contained the intensity that perhaps only warmed blood can have. It was this intense red that convinced me that the sauce couldn’t possibly contain the carefully-distributed-out pig’s blood. But afterwards I learned that it had, and my stomach and my eyes will never forget that thick, piercing red again.

     I could go on for hours about the multiplicity of color in the Dai women, with their pitch-black, oiled hair juxtaposed to the pink and red flowers they wove into it, or the hundreds of different colors that they used to decorate the inside of their houses. But most striking really was the orange and black of the monks riding on motorcycles. I think it was their baldheads that really made it strange, or perhaps just the flowy material of their solid orange robes in contrast to the hard, flashy shine of the black motorcycles. I was most struck by it because we had just been to visit the famous White Pagoda, where Sakyumani was supposed to have visited. The untainted, pure, powder-like white of the temple radiated peace and calm. High up on a plateau reached only by the temple’s 700 steps, the pagoda looks out onto the Burmese mountains. Only breached by the gold that tipped the points of the nine towers, the holy whiteness of the temple was perfection to my eyes. It soothed them after the exciting and shocking sharpness of the villagers’ colors.

     Unlike the Confucian intellectuals that came up with all the four-character sayings, I have now been to ‘green water, blue skies’ and I have seen the beauty that lies between them. It was as if each bright color I encountered on the trip stabbed a hole in the blurry film that the Beijing dust had gradually covered my eyes with, and now that I’m back those holes in the film are sore and aching to return to the defined landscapes and focused sight of the south. For there’s something more than mere pigment that my eyes saw in the colors of those people and places. I saw a clarity in their minds that most city folk have lost: The pleasure of a solid color; the power of pure simplicity.