Luoyang Mudan Flower Fair
01 · Historical Records
Peony cultivation originated in the Heluo region and has a history of more than sixteen hundred years to this day. Luoyang was the eastern capital of the Tang dynasty, with convenient transport and thriving trade; nurseries and gardens stood dense within the city, and there was a tradition of nearly every household growing peonies, so that the flower-viewing craze reached its height for a time. The lines of the Tang poets Bai Juyi — "For twenty days the flowers bloom and fall, and the whole city seems mad" — and Liu Yuxi — "Only the peony is the nation's true beauty; when it blooms, the capital is stirred" — are vivid portrayals of the peony appreciation custom of the Eastern Capital Luoyang. From the Song dynasty onward, the peony-viewing custom became still more prevalent among the people. Ouyang Xiu's Record of the Peonies of Luoyang describes it thus: "The custom of Luoyang is, in the main, a fondness for flowers. " In Song-dynasty Luoyang there were more than a hundred peony varieties, many of them exceptionally precious; among them "Yaohuang" (Yao's Yellow) and "Weizi" (Wei's Purple) were hailed as the "king of peonies" and the "queen of peonies" and were especially favored. Since 1982 the peony has been the "city flower" of Luoyang, and every year from April 15 to 25, timed to coincide with the peony flowering season (the Grain Rain period), the city holds the "Luoyang Peony Festival."
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The peony is one of China's most famous flowers, long known as the "king of flowers." As one of the centers of peony cultivation, Luoyang already possessed systematic flower-growing techniques as early as the Tang and Song periods, and developed flower-viewing customs along with peony-related poetry, painting, legend, and costume, from which the Luoyang peony culture derived. In spring, high and low in the city alike wear flowers, even the burden-bearers. When the flowers bloom, officials and commoners vie in excursions, often setting up fairs at old temples and abandoned residences where there are ponds and terraces, spreading curtains and awnings, with the sounds of flutes and songs heard from one to another ... until the petals fall, and then it ends. During the festival, visitors carry out cultural activities around the peony — flower viewing, lantern viewing, painting, and poetry composition — so that the Luoyang peony culture is continually enriched and carried forward.
The fortnight from the fifteenth to the twenty-fifth
The fortnight around Grain Rain lets the late varieties open in turn, one garden after another.
The flower market among old shrines
Flower markets were held in the pools and ruins of old temples, where traders, poets and visitors mingled.
A flower in every doorway
Rich and poor alike set a bloom in the doorway, so the city's spring arrives before the fair opens.
Waiting for Yaohuang and Weizi
The famed varieties draw people across the city, and the waiting for the first bloom becomes the fair itself.
Viewing, lantern-viewing, painting and verse
Poets and painters occupy the gardens during the fair, the very scenes the Tang poets described.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
The dates of the Luoyang Peony Festival are set according to the flowering signs of the Grain Rain period, April 15 to 25 each year, exactly when the late-blooming varieties open one after another. During the festival, the gardens within the city, the streets and lanes, and the peony parks of the suburbs bloom in succession; visitors walk from the gardens to the streets and from the streets into the flower beds, flower and city inseparable from one another. The city's people treat this ten-day period as their own season: the rhythm of daily life shifts within the flowering season — children learn to know the flowers, old people play chess beneath them, each with their place.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
The weight of the Peony Festival lies in its turning a crop into a city's season. A cultivation history of more than a thousand years and the Tang-Song flower-viewing atmosphere survive in the gardens, and today they are carried on by the annual festival: the varieties are renewed and the ways of viewing flowers change, yet the relation between city and flower remains constant. Each festival is at once a market for gathering and distributing goods and a venue for display — painting, poetry, lantern-viewing, and photography each take their place — and in the flowering season a city is both livelier and more unhurried than usual.
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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