The Xingxing Blood Metaphor and its Color in Chinese Classical Poetry

Abstract

‘Xingxing blood’ was acknowledged in ancient China as a kind of metaphor which represented red color. But it looks too violent to convey beautiful red color. How could think of a monkey shedding blood when seeing flowers or fruits? This paper contends that there existed a reason for using the metaphor. According to some writings, the xingxing is regarded as an mysterious and unfamiliar animal for ancient people, which resulted in the birth of this attractive metaphor. To develop this question, I will use a complete enumeration method of analyzing all the poems which contain “猩” meaning red. Therefore, I divide the objects comparing to the color of xingxing blood into the four types with arranged in chronological order. The result is predicted that xingxing blood represented exotic scarlet-red, which was differentiated from traditional Chinese red colors. Being vivid and bright, it would be paired with the fancy objects. More importantly, this result could suggest a significant finding that ancient Chinese people cared much about outstanding and intuitive expressions in order to write poems more clearly.