Flower power gives fragrance during Spring Festival

With Spring Festival approaching, many Chinese people have started to prepare for the traditional celebration by growing a flower, the Chinese daffodil.

Daffodils bloom in early spring, usually coinciding with the most important Chinese festival, which in 2022 falls on 1 February.

The Chinese daffodil is one species of the Narcissus genus, which usually grows beside water and gets its name from a Greek myth about a young man named Narcissus, who rejected all romantic advances and fell in love with his own reflection in the water.

The flower is also known as the Chinese sacred lily. Its Mandarin name, shuixian, which literally translates to “water immortal”, gives it a halo of reverence among the literati.

As the festival season nears, matured bulbs are dug out of the soil, cleaned and placed in clear water as a festive decoration for Chinese New Year. For centuries, during the winter, these “immortals” have been kept by Chinese in porcelain vases and placed in prominent areas in the living rooms of wealthy households or the study areas of scholars, where the flower is appreciated for its white and yellow petals, sweet fragrance and beautiful stems.

Fan Chunyan, a flower hobbyist in Shanghai, bought two Chinese daffodil bulbs on 25 December 2021. She put them on a porcelain plate with water and observes their growth every day.

“I am aiming for a blossom on the day of the Lunar New Year,” she said. “It has been a fun pastime for me since childhood. When it blooms, the fragrance is so mesmerising that the festival feels incomplete without it.”

In the Hongqiao Flower Market of Shanghai, vendors have been putting plates of daffodil bulbs on their shelves. The first batches of Chongming daffodils for this winter, cultivated by the Shanghai Chongming Narcissus Professional Co-operative, which is based in the city’s Chongming Island district, were delivered to flower shops on 20 December 2021.

Shi Kesong, founder of the co-operative, said Chinese have been planting daffodils in Chongming for at least 500 years, according to Shanghai historical texts, but it was not until the early 20th century that planting them advanced from being a hobby to a profitable business.

Local lore has it that one day Shi Gulang, a Chongming villager, brought some daffodils with him during a visit to downtown Shanghai. As he rested by the roadside a foreigner asked him about the price of the flowers. Not speaking English, the villager raised two fingers to indicate two cents, but the foreigner gave him $2 (£1.50). As news spread, people on the island started to grow more daffodils and sell them downtown.

In the 1930s, the daffodils from Chongming dominated Shanghai’s winter flower market. “Older people told me that back then, the daily ferry from Chongming Island to Shanghai wouldn’t set off without the flowers being loaded on board,” recalled Shi, who was born in 1956 and raised in a well-known daffodil-growing family.

In 2002 his son, Shi Hao, noticed that the ecological development of Chongming was included in the Shanghai Urban Master Plan (1999-2020), and the district government had started promoting the development of its agriculture and flower industry.

“I encouraged my father to plant Chongming daffodils again,” Shi Hao said. The pair then began visiting former growers to collect seeds and conducted experiments in a 0.5-acre field to cultivate the flowers.

It took them seven years to accumulate enough bulbs. They started the co-operative in Xianghua township in 2009, and two years later they brought their first batch of 30,000 bulbs to market. Today, the Shi family has nearly 27 acres of greenhouses and several cold-storage units for the bulbs at the plantation. The cold allows the daffodils, which naturally go dormant in summer and bloom in winter, to blossom in different seasons.

The co-operative’s daffodils were displayed in a themed garden at the 10th China Flower Expo held in Chongming from May to July 2021.

Previously published on Chinadaily.com.cn