Chinese Red
Kanji or Chinese characters are an interesting set of letters or pictographs.
We, Japanese, use kanji letters, however, without minding what their shapes originally mean.
One example is a pictograph meaning Chinese red.
This character is called "shu" or "aka" in Japanese. It roughly means red in English.
Looking at it carefully, you can see it is composed of the following part.
This character means a cow, called "ushi" or "gyu" in Japanese.
So, the character "shu" or Chinese red consists of "gyu" or a cow. But it has additional bar(s) in its structure. It means a cow is cut at a throat by a knife, so that it pours out blood. And the color of the blood is Chinese red.
Practically, when applying it to commodities, this Chinese red or "shu" was originally taken out of an ore called Cinnabar or cinnabarite (red mercury(II) sulfide (HgS), native vermilion).
Japan had abundant Cinnabar. When the shu red was used in combination with gold, it really looked impressive especially in ancient days. Japan had abundant deposits of Cinnabar and gold, so that ancient capitals of Japan had main buildings painted or decorated using Cinnabar and gold. THey must have looked so vivid and vibrant.
Even today, there are many shinto shrines in Japan which abundantly use the shu red color.
But its origins is blood gushing out of a cut cow. It is not a Japanese sense. It is indeed Chinese origin.
Ancient Japanese developed a technique to crate red lacquer or red japanese, using Caesalpinia sappan, a species of flowering tree in the legume family, Fabaceae, that is native to Southeast Asia and the Malay archipelago. It has a common name of Sappanwood.
Japanese wooden tableware painted with lacquer with the ancient red
But, we had better still wonder what the ancient Chinese civilization was like as it created a character red in such a cruel manner in association with gushing blood of a cow.
Chinese people or the Han Chinese must have been a very wild tribe using a bleeding cow for some ritual. They must be still bellicose. Truly China occupies Tibet and part of central Asia by force and intends to invade territories of other countries the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Red China can be so dangerous.
Finally, for ordinary red (called "aka" in Japanese), the Japanese people usually use the following character.
Originally ancient Chinese invented this letter by combining a pictograph indicating "large" and "fire." So, another red is from fire, probably observed in a big flaming torch or a bonfire used also in a ritual.
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Mat 3:6 And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.
Mat 3:7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?