Meaning of the word blue

Blue originally meant Polygonum cuspidatum, an annual herb whose leaves are used to make the blue dye indigo.

Blue (pinyin: lán) is a Chinese character (commonly used). The character was first used in the Warring States period, and is derived from cursive. The original meaning of "blue" was polygonum (an herb), the indigo extracted from which was used as a dye, and was later extended to mean the color of indigo dye, i.e. blue.

"Blue", in the literature before the Tang Dynasty, almost always with the name of the plant. Scholarship generally believe that blue, table blue meaning, the Han Dynasty when the occasional.

The earlier documentary evidence of this usage comes from Jia Kui's "Spring and Autumn Zuo's biography of the exegesis": "Summer 鳸 steal Xuan, interesting people to cultivate seedlings; autumn 鳸 steal the blue, interesting people to collect people; winter 鳸 steal the yellow, interesting people to cover the hidden people; echinocactus 鳸 steal the dan, for the fruit of the birds also."

"Stealing blue", i.e. light blue. In addition, there is a joint color word "Zhu Lan", which appeared earlier in the Eastern Jin Dynasty "Hou Han Ji": "So I want to use the texture of the plain silk, near the Zhu Lan ear." It was only after the Tang Dynasty that the use of "蓝" for the color blue gradually became more common.

In describing the color of the sky, words like "blue sky, blue sky" were produced. For example, Du Fu's poem "There is an azure sky above", Zhu Xi's poem "The white dragon flies down to the blue sky", Wang Fuzhi's words "The slanting harvest returns to light the azure sky", Wang Shizhen's " The azure sky wrinkled fish scales" and so on.

The blueprints used for industrial drawings were blue after sensitization, so they were called blueprints, and were often used as a metaphor for construction plans, such as "the blueprints for the construction of the motherland". In addition, the base on which a work is written is called a blueprint