C Chinese Color Language Victoria Bogushevskaya Department of Humanities, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy Synonyms Color categorization, Color idiom, Color lexicon, Color naming, Color symbolism Definition Associative and symbolic meanings of culturally the most significant color categories. Notions on Color in Early China In Western thought color has been associated with light (at least since the time of Aristotle), whereas in ancient China color was linked to the dichot- omy colored/uncolored – either by nature, or arti- ficially – and unrelated to the presence or absence of light. Colors were considered the property of the object itself and were therefore “perceived not as abstract concepts but as concrete substances, endowed with rich meanings” [1]. For instance, color correspondences applied to sacrificial ani- mals during the Late Shāng 尚 (ca. 1250–1046 BCE) period required that white, red, and multicolored animals were sacrificed in the ancestral cult; black sheep were used in the rain-making ritual; yellow animals were particu- larly addressed to the cosmic spirits of the earth and the cardinal directions [2]. Multicolored ani- mals were inferior to those of pure color because they symbolized a ritual impurity. These first attempts of color categorization are registered in Shāng oracle bone inscriptions ( jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文), the earliest written records of Chinese civilization. Color symbolism was directly related to the material from which the color was derived. Red was regarded as a “life-giving” color, a magical return of the soul: evidence from burial sites sug- gest that red ochre during Paleolithic and cinnabar from Neolithic times to the Hàn 漢 dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) were interred along with the corpses [3]. Traces of cinnabar, applied with a writing brush, occur in the incised lines of writing on Shāng oracle bones. Unknown in ancient Egyptian painting and the early Mesopotamian cultures, cinnabar, the natu- rally occurring mineral form of mercuric sulfide, was one of the most precious materials and sig- nificant colorants in ancient China. Finely ground and mixed with glue, it makes a brilliant and glowing red pigment. Another “magical” property of cinnabar, which is the color of blood and thus of life itself, is that it can be transformed into mer- cury, or quicksilver, a “living” metal. Mercury was also employed in early burial practices in China. The floor of the tomb of the First August Emperor of Qín 秦始皇帝 (r. 221–210 BCE) is © Springer Science+Business Media LLC 2022 R. Shamey (ed.), Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_433-1