A study in scarlet: cultural memory of the tropes related to the color red, female countenance, and onstage makeup in the Sinophone world

In a high-context culture like Chinese, the linguistic code encompasses only part of the message and is incomplete without context (Hall 1976: 91). One of the implicit codes embedded in high-context communication is colour tropes. Highly recognisable in the Sinophone world, colour tropes often manifest themselves in the forms of metaphor, metonymy, allusions, and similes and are often related to the conveyance of emotional content. This paper provides a selection and discussion of such colour tropes, demonstrates that colour in a language inspires associations and connotations that are often very subtle and determined by deep cultural memory, and, giving several Chinese examples, shows how the primary semasiology of a colour term often influences its subsequent semantic extension.