Many museums and auction houses are often unaware of the pun rebuses hidden in traditional Chinese pictures and have treated them as mere naturalistic ones. Thus, the cultural and social significance contained in the motifs are unfortunately overl...

A gathering of four distinctively different fishes can be read as a pun rebus design expressing an admonishing message ‘qing bai lian jie 清白廉洁’, which literally means ‘pur...

A fish is an ancient symbol of material prosperity and fertility in China, both because it puns with another word yu 余 meaning ‘abundance’, and because of the...

The motif of Yi Ba Lian 一把莲 is also called ‘yi shu lian’ (一束莲). It is presented as ‘a ribbon-tied bouquet of lotus in bud, full bloom, and seed pods acc...

Lotus flower is one of the most commonly seen motifs in Chinese traditional artworks. It is particularly favoured by scholars because one of its biological characteristics is that it grows out of mud yet blooms pure and untainted flowers, which scholars refer to their own uncorrupted nature.

Lotus in Chinese can b...