Writing Into Nature: Living Rainbows in Chinese History

Rainbows appear in the earliest Chinese sources, but their meaning and significance was not fixed throughout Chinese history. By the Song dynasty at least, naturalistic explanations of rainbows as light hitting droplets of water were available, but this was far from the consensus. This paper traces the history of how rainbows were understood in pre-modern China, with a particular emphasis on how lexicographic and cosmological assumptions influenced these understandings. In a number of texts, rainbows were described as being sexually dimorphic and exhibiting animal-like behaviour such as the ability to drink water. These conceptions persisted even after more modest explanations based on observation had appeared. This illustrates the influence these assumptions – about language, writing, and the importance of binaries – had on Chinese conceptions of natural phenomena.

Oliver Hargrave is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford and is currently researching the intellectual history of rainbows in pre-modern China for the Needham Institute on the Jing Brand Fellowship. He is interested in the intersection of Chinese conceptions of the natural world with intellectual history, including philosophy and religion. His DPhil research was on textual representations of trees in Early and Medieval China, with a particular focus on strange or unusual trees and how they were understood.