The Trials of Orchids

Author: Mu Anxiang

  The orchid is an ornamental plant that people love; like the peony and the lotus, it has become a carrier of culture. For several hundred years, orchid growers in Jiangsu and Zhejiang have selected and bred many famous varieties of Chinese cymbidium (Chunlan) and Huilan, with nearly nine hundred recorded varieties. This figure is limited to only some ancient catalogues and documents; the actual number selected was far greater. Of the historical famous Chunlan and Huilan varieties that have survived to this day, only about one hundred remain, a proportion far too low relative to those selected. Even by the nine hundred varieties recorded in some documents, only about one-ninth survive, which is to say that close to eight hundred or more varieties perished in the course of history. This figure is truly astonishing. What caused such a great calamity for famous orchid varieties?

  The reasons why famous orchid and cymbidium varieties perished throughout history are many-sided; we cannot make a sweeping generalization. The orchid is a living plant, and birth, aging, sickness and death are unavoidable. Among each variety, new growth replaces the old and dead; this is a natural law and also the orchid's way of reproducing life. Orchids that die abnormally due to disease can be divided into two cases: one in which part of the seedlings die of disease while another part survives and is passed on; the other in which all the seedlings die of disease and the variety is extinguished. Ancient orchid catalogues once recorded such cases in history. In recording the green Huilan "Tangming Shuixian", the Wuxing Lanhui Pu says: "Small lotus-petal form, soft pincers, large round tongue, slender stem, single-character frame. Came from a Suzhou courtesan's house; after flowering it was damaged and withered, and within the year the variety was lost." In recording "Yongsi Mei", the Lanhui Xiaoshi says: "Obtained by Zha Yongsi of Shanghai during the Xuantong reign of the former Qing. Five petals separated into segments, ru-yi tongue, the bud tip with extremely heavy white flesh. Because it was steamed and smothered too long, after planting it gradually withered and could not be retained. What a pity! Half-Garden Master Tang Tuo could not bear to part with it, and in the twelfth year of the Republic had the plate remade and included." Such famous orchid varieties that perished without continued propagation make up only a small portion; most famous orchid varieties that perished did so from "natural disasters and man-made calamities." Let us first speak of these "natural disasters."

  In the Lanhui Xiaoshi it says: "The records in this compilation begin from the winter of Renchen in the Guangxu reign of the former Qing, the old famous varieties that survived after the great freeze, as well as the fine varieties newly collected from the mountains year by year." The year "Renchen of the Guangxu reign of the former Qing" is the year known in history as the year of the "Great Freeze" (1892 AD). Wu Enyuan says in [Chronicle]: "In the eleventh month of winter in the Renchen year of Guangxu, there was severe cold for more than ten days." According to Zheng Tongmei's Shilan Shiyan: "I first became passionately fond of orchids in the spring of the Renchen year. It happened that the winter of that year was extraordinarily cold, the waterways froze hard and there was no passage to and fro for five or six days." "The flowers I kept were only placed indoors, yet there was not a pot that did not freeze. At that time the thermometer dropped to seventeen or eighteen degrees, so I placed an iron stove in the center of the room and kept the coal burning day and night; after about two days, they were finally preserved." "Mr. Feng Yuchen came to visit and spoke of this; he greatly marvelled, for orchids everywhere had frozen and withered, amounting in value to no less than more than one hundred thousand in gold." History does not record how many famous varieties perished in that year of the great freeze; "amounting in value to no less than more than one hundred thousand in gold" shows how numerous the losses were at the time. Because of climate, withered orchids and cymbidiums occur every year, but compared with "natural disasters," "man-made calamities" are even more shocking. Here we focus on several great calamities that orchid and cymbidium varieties suffered in history due to "man-made calamities."

  Xu Jielou, author of the Lanhui Tongxin Lu, had a son, Xu Jielan, who once said: "In the tumult of Gengshen, the family suffered burning and destruction, firewood and timber were all gone, and the orchids and cymbidiums too were trampled." "Not one in ten survived; recalling the rare and wondrous forms of former years, they can never be obtained again." Yuan Shijun says in Lanyan Shulue: "In the upheaval of Gengshen, not a single branch could be carried away; all were trampled, and I was grieved over it for a long time." "Jiaxing and Fengjing had the most superb varieties; after the military disaster they were all destroyed and damaged. What a pity." The "tumult of Gengshen" refers to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement of 1860, the tenth year of the Xianfeng reign of the Qing. In that year, wars of the Qing army suppressing the Taiping army occurred in southern Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and in the north the Anglo-French allied forces attacked Beijing and burned the Old Summer Palace in a savage invasion. The country was broken and families ruined, the people had no means of livelihood, and many famous orchid and cymbidium varieties of Jiangsu and Zhejiang were trampled. We can also see this from records of certain famous varieties. In recording "Shenglin Meisu," the Lanhui Tongxin Lu says: "Planted for three years and already grown to seven tubes of leaves; alas, destroyed in the Geng turmoil." "Da Lu Mei": "Alas, it suffered in the tumult of Gengshen, and the variety no longer exists." The Lanyan Shulue records of the Chunlan "Xiaoshan Meisu": "After the military disaster in Zhejiang in Gengshen the variety was cut off; at that time dealers replaced it with what was also a green Meisu produced in Ningbo during the Xianfeng period." "Tougui Mei": "In Xianfeng Gengshen it was finally lost." "Zhaoguai Mei": "After Xianfeng Gengshen it was lost." The Huilan "Wang Mingyang Su": "At the time of Tongzhi (Xianfeng) Gengshen, when Jiangsu and Zhejiang suffered military disaster, it was cut off." (The "Wang Mingyang Su" circulating today is very likely a variety falsely named by later people.) In the "tumult of Gengshen," famous orchid and cymbidium varieties "not one in ten survived," and orchid culture also suffered great damage. The Lanhui Tongxin Lu and Lanyan Sizhong successively recorded that, affected by the "ravages of war" at the time, ancient orchid catalogues were lost or burned. The Lanhui Tongxin Lu says: "The Tu family of Changzhou wrote the Lanhui Jing; the Zhu family of Suzhou had the Diyi Xiang Biji; the Chen family of Jiashan had the Wangzhe Xiang Ji; the Yun family of Yixing had the Xinglan Ji; the Huang family of Yuyao had the Lanhui Pu; the Cheng family of Fengjing had the Lanhui Lunlue. After the ravages of war, most were lost and could not be collected and recorded." The Lanhui Jing (Jing) and the Diyi Xiang Biji were both preserved. The Wangzhe Xiang Ji of the Chen family of Jiashan (this Chen was very likely Chen Yangeng, a very famous orchid master of the time), the Xinglan Ji of the Yun family of Yixing, the Lanhui Pu of the Huang family of Yuyao, and the Lanhui Lunlue of the Cheng family of Fengjing (this Cheng was very likely Cheng Youwei; the Xu Lanhui Tongxin Lu, in recording "Dakui Su," says: "Cheng Youwei, a filial and incorruptible scholar of Fengjing, said: If Huilan should meet the golden-eyed Su, it would be the finest sight of letters in the realm.") Unfortunately, these precious ancient orchid catalogues were mostly burned in the "tumult of Gengshen," and we can hardly see them to this day.

  Another time that Jiangsu and Zhejiang orchids and cymbidiums suffered "ravages of war" was in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the Japanese army invaded Jiangnan. We cite the record in [War Traces Pilgrimage], published on July 1, 1938, by the Japanese Obara Eijiro (Liushuisheng), author of the Lanhua Pu, in his journal Shuwei Zhi You. It records that on April 13 of that year Obara Eijiro arrived at Wuxi. Because of the chaos of war, Jiang Dongfu was then taking refuge in Shanghai. The Xiangcao Ju garden of Jiang Dongfu in Wuxi was occupied by a Japanese artillery unit; the orchids and cymbidiums were almost all gone, pots and bowls scattered in disorder, and the red sandalwood flower stands and the like became fuel for the troops. Rong Wenqing's home was burned down; Zhuang Yansheng's famous orchids were almost all gone, the whereabouts of the orchids and cymbidiums unknown, the orchid shed torn down and used as material to build air-raid trenches. The whole family fled to the mountains to take refuge. On April 15 Obara Eijiro arrived at Suzhou; the local famous orchid growers Fei Shiying and Xie Ruisheng (Shan) abandoned their orchids and cymbidiums and fled, taking refuge in Shanghai. On April 25 Obara Eijiro arrived at Hangzhou; the owners of the various orchid gardens fled, and many orchids and cymbidiums were burned or used as horse feed. More than two hundred pots of famous orchid and cymbidium varieties belonging to the famous Hangzhou orchid grower Qi Zhigang were all transferred to Obara Eijiro, and on May 9 of the same year were transported by Obara Eijiro to Tokyo, Japan. That year Ueda Seiichi, stationed in Shanghai for Japan, also transported to Japan the famous orchid varieties he had collected in China (kept and raised on his behalf in Shaoxing). From the 1920s to the 1940s, over these twenty-odd years, Japanese orchid people collected many famous orchid and cymbidium varieties in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions of China. Were all these varieties preserved? The situation is not optimistic either; here we will say a few more words. In 1937 Obara Eijiro's Lanhua Pu was published, precisely the peak period of Japanese orchid growers cultivating Chinese orchids. By 1941, when the Pacific War broke out in full, the war did not bring Japan national prosperity and a stable life for the people, and orchids and cymbidiums also fell into a deep valley. Matsumura Kenzo of Japan says in My Orchid Diary: "During the war, moving about everywhere, the orchids suffered damage; in winter they were put into air-raid trenches and enveloped in damp heat, which damaged the orchids a great deal." The Japanese orchid grower Aruga Kunnosuke says in the article Things I Wish to Know: "Because of the war everyone gave up orchids; enthusiasts and merchants had no time to attend to them. After returning from the war, although it continued, everyone was busy making a living for food and lodging; it was a time of buying and selling rice and wheat while competing to sell cloth, tires, and gravel." Matsumura Kenzo again says in My Orchid Diary in 1952: "Although we do not know how many varieties were imported from China before the war, it is certain that many varieties were extinguished in the war." Chinese orchid growers also recorded some of the damage to orchids and cymbidiums at the time. Shen Yuanru wrote an inscription in his own hand on the back of the original photograph of "Shengli Dahe" in 1946, in which he spoke of the destruction of the orchids and cymbidiums Rong Wenqing had planted in his lifetime: "Shengli Dahe, red Huilan. Produced in the thirteenth year of the Republic. At the time it was jointly obtained by the seniors Cao Ziyu and Rong Wenqing, and named Cao Rong Dahe. Twenty-five years later it flowered again unofficially once. The following winter, at the time of the China-Japan Incident, the orchids and cymbidiums planted by Rong Wenqing were almost all ravaged by war. Only a few weak pots remained~~~." The Lanyuan Jishi, in recording "Dakui Su," says: "When the Japanese army invaded China and nibbled away at Jiangsu and Zhejiang, Zheng, for safety's sake, took refuge in Shanghai, and all the orchids and cymbidiums were buried pot and all in the courtyard in the countryside. The following year Feng Rumei of Huzhou, having obtained Zheng's consent, went to Shuanglin to inspect; the orchid plants were already gone, only empty pots remained. That year the weather was extremely cold; the orchid plants may have frozen to death. It is most regrettable." The "Zheng" here refers to Zheng Tongmei. I once asked Mr. Feng Rumei, a leading authority in today's orchid world, about how Zheng Tongmei's orchids and cymbidiums were passed on. He said that many of Gu Xiangxiao's orchids and cymbidiums came from Xu Jielou, and the orchids from Gu Xiangxiao's collapsed shed returned to Wu Enyuan. This is recorded in the Lanhui Xiaoshi: "In the autumn of the Renyin year of Guangxu, all of the Gu family's orchids and cymbidiums went to Jiufeng Ge." Most of Wu Enyuan's orchids and cymbidiums later went to Zheng Tongmei. When the Japanese army invaded China in 1937, Zheng Tongmei fled to Shanghai, and the orchids he had planted were all destroyed at this time. Zheng Tongmei died not long after about 1940. "Jianweng" says in the afterword to Shilan Shiyan: "Not long after the China-Japan war broke out in the Dingchou year, Huzhou fell, and the famous orchids of various families all suffered plunder by the invaders, and [Dakui Su] could no longer be inquired after. It had surely truly returned to Langyuan." According to the preface of Shilan Shiyan, the Huzhou orchid grower Ding Shaolan also took refuge in Shanghai at the time. According to the Lanyuan Jishi: "In the early 1950s, I had the good fortune to know the senior Yao Xuanyu of Wumen. In the gentleman's home were kept several hundred pots of orchids and cymbidiums, most of them very precious varieties, left behind by his honored father Mr. Junyu. Unfortunately, when the Japanese invaders occupied the city of Suzhou, all the orchid plants and the like were deposited in a flower nursery of the Wang family and buried beside the fence. After the pacification, when he returned home, most of the famous varieties and flowers had been destroyed and damaged; only the remnant plants of 'Dongshan Mei' remained. In his heart he grieved greatly." "Cheng Yuanding, a native of Changshu, of a prominent family, was generous by nature. In his residence there was a small garden, with exquisite rockeries and luxuriant flowers and trees, an extremely beautiful environment. Beside the house were planted more than a hundred pots of orchids and cymbidiums, all precious famous varieties." "At that time the Japanese invaders occupied Jingbei, and then nibbled away at East China. From Changshu bad news came from time to time. For safety's sake, he took his whole family, bought a boat and went south to take temporary refuge in Dangkou town in Suzhou, renting a house to live in. Dozens of superior orchid plants he carried with him. Although the lotus-petal plain flowers bloomed in full glory, with every rustle of wind and cry of cranes and alarms several times a day, he had no heart to enjoy them. After Changshu fell, it soon became calm again, and the refugees returned home one after another. Cheng also returned, but the flowers could only remain for a time, and in the end, for lack of anyone to manage them, they withered and failed." Through these historical records above, we can see that the destruction of orchids and cymbidiums at the time was very serious. From the "tumult of Gengshen" in the Qing dynasty all the way to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, wars continued without cease and society was in turmoil, and famous orchid and cymbidium varieties again and again suffered calamities, with countless famous varieties lost. In the 1950s a revival appeared in domestic orchids. In the early 1950s Xu Jinkang was responsible for preparing the orchid room of the Shanghai Botanical Garden; in 1953 Zhu Youren was responsible for preparing the Hangzhou Orchid Room; in 1956 the Chinese Academy of Sciences established a botanical garden in Beijing, in which some orchids and cymbidiums were kept and raised; in 1958 Marshal Zhu De invited Zhu Zhangfu to create an orchid room in Zhongshan Park; the orchid rooms of the Canglangting Park and the Jingjiang Park in Suzhou were also established one after another. Unfortunately, the good times did not last long; the "Cultural Revolution" that began in the mid-1960s plunged orchids into an even greater abyss.

  The "Cultural Revolution" defined flower-growing as feudal, capitalist and revisionist, and orchids too were among those to be eradicated. According to the Jiangsu Provincial Garden Gazetteer, Shen Yuanru in the 1950s had 51 kinds of Huilan and 70 kinds of Chunlan, a total of 121 kinds, reaching more than two thousand pots. Unfortunately, in his later years he suffered the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution; his orchids and cymbidiums were all lost, and he fell ill from pent-up grief and died with regret. During the ten years of turmoil, the Shanghai Botanical Garden had no one to manage its orchids and cymbidiums, leaving them to wind and rain, and most wilted or were lost. Mr. Liu Hanlin of Shanghai once gave all of more than one hundred and sixty pots of his beloved orchids and cymbidiums, accumulated over many years, to the Shanghai Botanical Garden to keep and raise, and during the Cultural Revolution they too all came to nothing; the orchids and cymbidiums kept in the Hangzhou Orchid Room suffered extremely great losses. Matsumura Masanao, son of Matsumura Kenzo of Japan, says in the article Appreciation of Orchids: "Jiuhua has become extremely rare in China in recent years. When I inquired of a gardener at Hangzhou (Flower Garden), as famous varieties there were only 2 to 3 kinds such as 'Cheng Mei' and 'Duan Hui Mei.' My father believed that since the Cultural Revolution, China's famous varieties have been scattered and lost." I once asked Mr. Yao Yuping, who had worked at the Hangzhou Flower Garden. He told me: By the later period of the Cultural Revolution, famous Huilan varieties were completely gone, and the surviving famous Chunlan varieties were also small seedlings and weak rhizomes, most of them having lost their names; the orchids and cymbidiums planted in the botanical garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, the Canglangting Orchid Room in Suzhou and others could not escape this calamity either; although the orchid room of Beijing Zhongshan Park received some protection, the orchids and cymbidiums were neglected in management. In that year the garden department collected more than one hundred precious orchids and cymbidiums, and Zhu Zhangfu brought forty fine varieties, among which the exceptionally precious "Zishou Jinzhang" is now nowhere to be found; many orchid-growing households in Shaoxing, the hometown of orchids, were labeled bourgeois and subjected to struggle sessions, and their orchids were moved to the grounds and destroyed; after the famous Yuyao orchid grower Hu Zhitian and his wife passed away, their orchids and cymbidiums were kept and raised by their son Hu Xiaoyan. During the Cultural Revolution, to guard against the unexpected, after dividing the pots he either sent them scattered to the countryside to be cared for by relatives and friends, or hid them in wooden boxes under the bed, and taking advantage of the deep silence of night, brought them out to water and "air" them; Feng Rumei, Old Feng of Huzhou, had a lifetime of hardship and loved orchids and cymbidiums all his life. He once kept more than a hundred pots of famous orchid and cymbidium varieties, but unfortunately during the "Cultural Revolution" they were stolen and scattered, all gone. In 1965 the famous orchid master Wang Shuping of Yuyao died of illness. It is said that during his lifetime he transferred most of his orchids to others to keep and raise, but he also left some behind, and his youngest son also loved orchids. At that time it happened to coincide with the extraordinary period of the "Cultural Revolution" of sweeping away poisonous weeds, and he did not dare grow them at home, so he secretly planted them in the ground, and did not dare go to care for them; these orchids all withered, and so on. Here we can list many cases of the destruction of orchids and cymbidiums at the time; it can be said to have been a catastrophe for famous orchid and cymbidium varieties. Who at that time dared talk about orchids? Who dared not **? Of course, the main purpose of the "Cultural Revolution" was not aimed at orchids. When the city gate catches fire, the fish in the pond are affected. At that time orchid art too became a vacuum zone. From the start of the "Cultural Revolution" in the 1960s all the way to the late 1970s, surprisingly not a single Jiangsu-Zhejiang orchid work of reference value was published in China; only after the 1980s did Shen father and son's Orchids, Gu Shuqi's Lanyuan Jishi and others come out one after another.

   The planting and cultivation of orchids is the key to their survival; failing to get through the planting-and-cultivation stage is also a trial for orchids. In the [Appendix] of the Lanyan Shulue it says: "In Shanghai there was a certain Jiang, one of several brothers. Since the Yisi year he had specially sent people to Yuyao to buy famous old flowers, spending about two thousand in gold, and also bought new flowers as well as pots and soil, and separately hired a man from Yuyao to plant them, spending more than two thousand in gold again. By the winter of the Xinwei year, after dismissing the man from Yuyao, he hired a layman to plant them, and so the flowers and leaves all wilted. In total there were one hundred and ninety pots of small leaves; last winter they were frozen and steamed, and this spring they all wilted. It is most regrettable." Examples of wilting due to improper planting, cultivation or care are truly too many in orchid writings and in reality. For stem rot and soft rot there is still no good remedy to this day, and gnawing by rats and urination by cats are impossible to guard against completely. An orchid is like a beauty; beauties often suffer ill fortune. The Shuhui Pian says: "When one meets someone who loves them, one treasures them and divides and plants them, and they may continue for several decades. But if one day they wither and die, then it is like the Guangling San." A folk proverb recorded in the Linghai Lanyan says: "Orchids have no three-year leaves; a family has no three-generation orchids." "Ancestors seek them at twice their weight in gold, while descendants cast them off like worn-out sandals; this is everywhere."

    The foundation of petal-type orchids lies in common orchids. Among orchids, petal-type flowers arise through natural hybridization of orchids, accounting for only one in ten thousand, or one in a hundred thousand, of common orchids. Protecting wild orchid resources will allow new petal-type flowers to continue far into the future. From the 1980s to the present, more than twenty years, driven by economic interests, wild orchid resources have suffered an unprecedented catastrophe. In the past, the mountain collectors who made their living by collecting orchids were very few in number, and collecting orchids meant searching among the orchids for the strange and seeking the precious, leaving most common orchids on the mountain. Today, the diggers of orchids outnumber them a thousandfold or ten thousandfold, digging up every orchid they see and leaving not a single scrap. Without common orchids, where will precious and famous varieties come down from the mountains in the future? "If the skin does not exist, what will the hair attach to?"

The trials of orchids are too numerous to list. Zhu Kerou says in the [Trials of Flowers] section of the Diyi Xiang Biji: "A drunken guest overturns the pot, a rat gnaws the buds, it is pinned in an ugly woman's hair, it is cultivated in a philistine's hands." The orchid "trials" spoken of here are truly negligible compared with the "natural disasters and man-made calamities" we have listed above. Today the country is prosperous and the people are at peace, society is stable, and people of insight call for the early legislation of orchid resource protection, and the orchid cause is flourishing day by day. Orchid growers may fully cherish the orchids in their hands, enjoy their fragrance, and cultivate their character. May the trials of orchids forever be far from us.