祥云 (xiáng yún) — Auspicious Cloud · A Sky Read as Evidence · The Pattern That Runs the Border

司马迁 put clouds in the astronomy chapter. 《史记·天官书》 works through the five planets, the comets, the eclipses and the haloes, and then, without changing register, describes a cloud: 若烟非烟，若云非云，郁郁纷纷，萧索轮囷 — like smoke and not smoke, like cloud and not cloud, dense and teeming, drawn out and coiling. 是谓卿云, that is called 卿云; 卿云，喜气也, and it is a sign of gladness. The definition repays a slow reading, because not one clause in it is a compliment. Two are refusals and two are shapes: the two ways the thing declines to behave like a cloud, and the two forms it takes instead. What qualifies it is not that it is beautiful. 祥云 is the everyday descendant of that catalogue entry, and it inherited the test rather than the poetry.

云 was the cloud first. 说文解字 files the full character under 雨 as 雲，山川气也, the breath of hills and rivers, and records the form without rain on top as the archaic one, its two turning strokes drawing vapor curling back on itself as it climbs. The rain got added because the plain graph was already busy: 云 had been borrowed for the verb to say, the 云 of 子曰诗云, and it held that second job through most of the literary tradition while the cloud went about in 雲. The 1956 simplification handed the character back its first meaning. That is why the word is written 祥云 on the mainland now and 祥雲 wherever traditional characters are still written — a case where the simplified form is the older of the two rather than the newer.

祥 supplies the reading. Its earliest use covered any anomaly at all, benign or dire, and sorting which was which took a court official and several centuries of ordinary speech; by the time the word fastened onto 云 that argument was over, and 祥云 means a cloud whose reading has already come back. What 云 supplies is the reason a mark in the sky counts as evidence and not as ornament. 《周易·乾·文言》 files it among the plain facts of like answering like — 云从龙, the cloud follows the dragon. The cloud is not the dragon and does not produce it; it is what the dragon's presence produces, which makes it the visible half of something otherwise unseen. The compound itself is the latecomer in this company. The Han registers catalogue the object under 卿云 and 庆云, and 祥云 is the name it took once it had stopped being a matter for the court — the form that survives in later narrative, where it is what an immortal or a bodhisattva arrives on, and on paper and cloth, where it is simply the pattern.

In 1913 the Republic of China took its provisional national anthem from four lines about a cloud. 汪荣宝 lifted them out of the 卿云歌, appended an adapted line from the same story — 时哉夫，天下非一人之天下也, reworking Shun's 「明哉，天下非一人之天下也」 a few sentences earlier — and a Belgian musician, Jean Hautstont, set the result. In 1921 the four lines were adopted again on their own, now with music by 萧友梅, and kept until 1928. The song contains no state, no army, no founder and no river. It describes a bright vapor spreading over the sky and then says 旦复旦兮, dawn and again dawn; 复旦大学 takes its name from those four characters. 卿云 is also written 庆云, and it is the same object the Han sky-watchers catalogued: a five-colored cloud, the top grade of the favorable sky. 祥云 is what the term became after it came down off the register of state portents and onto paper, cloth and wood, where it no longer had to be five-colored or rare to count.

On the decorative side the cloud acquired a grammar. It is drawn with a head and a tail — 云头, a tight spiral, with a streak trailing behind it that can be pulled to whatever length the object needs — so it always reads as a cloud going somewhere rather than a mass sitting still, and that is what lets it run a hem, climb a pillar or turn a corner without appearing to stop. The head is the same curl that tops a 如意 scepter, and the figure that sets four of them back to back has a name of its own, 四合如意云. Cut that figure in silk and you have the 四合如意 form of the 云肩, four cloud heads joined at the neck and falling over the shoulders — one shape among several the collar takes, and the one a bride is most often painted in. Carve it in stone and you get the 云板 driven through the 华表 columns outside 天安门. The resulting sky has its own four-character name, 祥云瑞气, and it is worth noticing that neither half of it names an event. Both name conditions, and the phrase stops before it says what is coming.