Things that crawl between lines and rhymes

For linguistic reasons, animals and insects have had a strong influence on the way Chinese see and portray life

There may be very few people who were more bent on filling their lives with auspicious cultural symbols than the Qing Dynasty Chinese. And to do so, they drew extensively from their millennia-old language, pairing two words with identical or similar pronunciations.

One prominent example is the bat, or fu, whose shared pronunciation with the Chinese word for fortune means that the animal has plenty of reason to expect more than a dark, damp cave. And the bat was indeed everywhere, from painted wooden corridors and window frames to embroidered clothing and even gold or gilt silver hair accessories.