On the stage of the Spring Festival Gala in the Year of the Tiger in 2022, the national style dance and poetry drama "Only This Green" has reached a new height. In just a few minutes, this nearly thousand-year-old picture scroll was put on the stage, making the pinnacle of Chinese green landscape painting "come alive". Every frame is beautiful, like a walking landscape painting! The dancers used the difficult movement "green waist" to dance the famous work "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" by the Northern Song Dynasty painter Wang Ximeng. This year's Beijing Winter Olympics is also not lacking in "classical green" outlines. The green of the eyes adds a different color to our lives. In fact, in ancient times, whether it was poetry or canvas, classical turquoise and our traditional Chinese medicine had a close relationship.
Historical evolution of cyan
Cyan belongs to the cool color system of colors, which first appeared in the Zhou Li. Later, there are also professional books that point out that as early as the pre-Qin, cyan had already appeared, and the cyan at that time included three color systems: blue, green and black. Another theory is that the ancients had a broader understanding of cyan, and cyan contains different monochromatic and transitional colors in the entire color system from blue to green. Later, with the development of continental dynasties, cyan was gradually determined to become blue and green, and the original black was deleted.
The source of indigo
Ancient dyes were mostly mineral or plant-based, and plant dyes were the most common. Cyan dye plants are mostly blue indigo. Blue indigo refers to bluegrass, which is a general term for this color system, referring to all plants that can make blue indigo dyes, mainly including indigo blue, wood blue and horse blue (plate blue), pine blue these four plants. Thousands of years of historical application, these dyed plants have developed to medicinal use, our great ancestors have been exploring, and our research on them is also deepening. The study found that plant indigo should be the most widely used and important dyeing raw material in ancient times, and can be dyed into a variety of different fiber products, such as silk, wool, cotton, hemp and so on. Blue indigo is dyed firmly, does not fade easily, and is better than other natural dyes. In addition to the cyan system, in the dyeing of the red, yellow, blue and purple systems, a variety of Chinese medicines such as madder, sumu, rhubarb, safflower, turmeric, gardenia, etc., have played a very important role.
Preparation method of indigo
The ancient method of preparing indigo is mainly to make the blue leaves into a solid indigo, the production method mainly includes soaking, fermentation, indigo three stages: harvesting stems and leaves in summer and autumn, placing them in a tank, soaking in water for 2 to 3 days, adding lime to every 10kg of leaves, when the leaves rot and dewist, remove the branches, stir fully, and make the blue indigo, because its shape looks like silt, so it is also called "indigo". The preparation of Qingdai adds two steps of refining and water. The concentrated solution of the blue indigo is prepared, stirred to produce a large amount of foam, the foam floating on the liquid surface is fished out, dried, and it is made into a green daisy. The different colors of the cyan system should be mixed by different dyeing methods or by the proportion of dyeing raw materials.
Bluegrass medicinal plants
The Banlan Root, South Plate Blue Root, Big Green Leaf, Tateshina Green Leaf and Qing Dai included in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia (2020 Edition) are all from the above plants.
The above four have the effect of clearing heat and detoxification, but due to the different use sites and preparation methods, the effects have their own emphases. Banlan root is conducive to the length of the pharynx, the large green leaf cool blood spots are better than the banlan root, the green daisy taste salty and has the length of phlegm dissipation, and the work of clearing the liver is more significant. The effect of the south plate blue root is similar to that of the plate blue root, and both have the effect of clearing heat, detoxifying, cooling blood and eliminating spots. Ancient women also used Qingdai for thrush, so the eyebrows of ancient beauties may be dark blue-green. The following is an introduction to the bluegrass plants.
In addition to the above types of bluegrass, other plants can extract blue dyeing pigments such as: joint wood blue, wild wood blue, Arabian wood blue, silver wood blue, Carolina wood blue and so on.
About the Author
Zhao Qiansi female, pharmacist, currently working in Jingmen City Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital, engaged in traditional Chinese medicine related work.