It was a nice course giving by Guohua Huang, the inheritor and disseminator of natural dye, who receives the title of inheritor and disseminator of intangible cultural heritage of humanity in China. We spent seven days at his studio in Song Zhuang, an artist village in east 6th ring in Beijing. Huang started with the Chinese theory of colour, he asked everyone about the meaning of colour in Chinese theory... Colour was firstly defined in book Kao Gong Ji in earlier Qin dynasty, which is about 2800 years eariler than the western theory of colour. It states that red, qing(blue and green)and yellow belong to Cai, black and white belong to Se, the combination of Se and Cai means colour. Those five colours correspond to the five universal elements of water, fire, wood, metal and earth, and also five directions of east, west, north and middle. In addition, it is also relevant to five tones of music, five internal organs in human body, five flavours , five seasons in Chinese tradition... Five and nine reign supreme,highly sensitive numbers. The relationships of five directions, elements, heavenly creature and colours East: Right- Azure Dragon- Wood- Green and Blue West: Left- White Tiger- Metal- White and Gold South: Down- Vermilion Bird- Fire- Red North: Up- Black Tortoise- Water- Black Center: Yellow Dragon- Earth- Yellow Colours plays a vitally important role in history, culture, and policy. Huang shared storys about red ,qing, and yellow in different periods of history. Huang keens on his research about finding natural colours and making colours samples about 30 years. His natural dye journey is full of uncucountless experiments and failures, times of failure are much more than scuess. He finds history, botany, geographic and even dye recipes of colours from ancient wisdom. Best books like Kao Gong Ji, Qi Ming Yao Shu(Important Arts for the People's Welfare, A.D533-544), Ben Cao Gang Mu( compendium of material medica, A.D.1590), Tian Gong Kai Wu (A.D.1637), Hong Lou Meng (A Dream in Red Mansions, A.D.1791)... For example, few books record that there are five plants could be made for blue dyes. Xueqin Cao, the writer of A Dream in Red Mansions mentions about 164 colours in her literature, but without enough explanations. Some recipes are too concise so that colorists have to do a lot of work on it. Some colours are found by unexpecting result. Huang brought leaves from a kind of local tree in mid China, surprisingly found that this red dye turns green on fabric after wash. After a half day talk about 'Yesterday, today and tomorrow of natural dye', we jumped to the experimental part. Blue-Indigo It came out different depth of blue by increasing the times of dyeing. We are told to dye one time, three dyes, six times and nine times, on the basis of using same amount of dye and time each dye. Green- Indigo + Cape jasmine flower dye, Indigo + pericarpium granati dye, Indigo + tea leaves dye Yellow- Pericarpium granati, Tea leaves ...
