In China the orchid carries a quite different and elevated symbolism. It is one of the Four Gentlemen of painting, standing for spring, and it is above all the emblem of the junzi, the cultivated and virtuous person, whose quiet integrity is likened to the orchid that gives its fragrance unseen in a lonely valley. Confucius is credited with the saying that the words of the good are fragrant as an orchid, and orchid came to signify refined friendship, moral nobility and hidden virtue. The same flower thus holds two symbolic lives, the Western emblem of fertility, luxury and exotic beauty, and the Chinese emblem of the noble and self-effacing character.
In nineteenth-century Britain a genuine collecting mania, nicknamed orchidelirium, sent professional plant-hunters to remote and dangerous parts of the tropics in search of new orchid species for wealthy collectors, with single rare specimens fetching prices that could exceed a labourer's annual wage at auction, a real and well-documented episode of botanical fashion running in parallel with, and largely ignorant of, the flower's much older Chinese symbolism of humble, unseen virtue. That same tension between costly rarity and modest hidden fragrance runs through the flower's whole history, whether read as an emblem of the Confucian gentleman or as a Victorian status symbol.