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Green Cloud image
In the Jimao year of the Tongzhi reign of the Qing dynasty (1869), a 14-year-old girl named Chen Luyun from Liuxia Town in Hangzhou was gathering firewood with her father at Daqingli (a place name) on Wuyun Mountain in Hangzhou. She happened to discover, beneath a pine tree where clothes had been laid, a clump of orchids with a rich fragrance and remarkably elegant flowers. Out of curiosity, Chen Luyun dug up the clump of orchids, roots and all, took them home and planted them in a broken rice-washing basket. Around March of the same year, Shao Zhiyan, owner of the Canhua Studio and the writing-brush shop at Guanxiangkou in Hangzhou, a famous senior figure in Chinese orchid circles, was passing by Chen Luyun's home to rest while visiting his ancestral graves on Wuyun Mountain during Qingming when he accidentally spotted the orchids in the basket. Because Shao loved orchids deeply, he immediately asked Chen Luyun's father, Chen Zhongbin, for this orchid plant. To this end, Shao agreed to build a house for the Chen family and provide a hundred mu of good farmland in Liuxia Town, Chen Zhongbin's ancestral home. In the end, he even married Chen Zhongbin's only daughter, Chen Luyun, and took her home as his wife. For a time, it became a much-told tale. After marriage, the couple was even more loving and happy. To preserve this beautiful memory, Shao Zhiyan named the orchid after his wife, Luyun. He also specially commissioned a craftsman to carve the image of the orchid "Green Cloud" into a relief, using it as the trademark of the Shao Zhiyan brush shop to attract customers. Until the early 1950s, the elegant form of this orchid still remained on the wall of the brush shop run by Shao's children and grandchildren.
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