AOI
September 14th 2008 07:16
AOI
The hollyhock called Aoi in Japan
The Hollyhock plant , leaves and flowers, is an important motif in Japanese art and poetry. It appears in heraldic symbols of families like the Tokugawa and Mitsuba, on textiles, and in painting and poetry, and on ceramics and lacquer art works.
Aoi Character
Aoi is Althea Rosea and AOI is the KUN reading of the character which is GI or KI in SinoJapanese and KUI (tone 2) in Chinese. The SinoKorean is Kyu and the Vietnamese is Qui or Quy. IN dicitonaries its radical 140 and has a total of 16 strokes.
Footnotes in a couple of poetry anthologies I have read state that the Japanese use Aoi to indicate two types of plants: The Tachi aoi and the futaba aoi.
This is porbably becasue in Chinese KUI inidcates a whole class of plants, holly hock, mallows, sunflowers geraniums, any herbaceous plant with large flowers.
While the phoentic part of the character offically menas Tenth Heavenly stem it could be literally read as climbs to the sky. In Cantonese its kwai4.
The Unicode is 8475 and hexadecimal E891B5.
If you found these notes helpful check out some of my ohter older blogs or subscribe.
I have been and will be doing more blogs showing what the plants mentioned in Chinese and Japanese poetry look like. Search for HAGI.
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