Rapeseed Yellow

Rapeseed Yellow is a landscape color created by the large-scale planting of agricultural civilization. Rapeseed has been cultivated as an oil crop in China for two thousand years. Every March, tens of millions of acres of rapeseed bloom simultaneously in the Yangtze River basin, dyeing the earth into an endless block of gold. The Northern Song poet Yang Wanli wrote, 'A child hurries after a yellow butterfly, which flies into the rapeseed flowers and is nowhere to be found,' describing the visual shock of Rapeseed Yellow engulfing everything.

European rapeseed cultivation began in medieval monasteries. Nuns used rapeseed oil to light lamps, and the rapeseed fields around the monasteries formed a golden sea in spring. Van Gogh depicted rapeseed fields multiple times during his Brabant period. He wrote to his brother, 'The yellow of the rapeseed is crazier and wilder than the sunflowers; the whole earth is burning.'

During the 18th-century British Agricultural Revolution, the crop rotation system promoted rapeseed cultivation. The Norfolk four-course rotation made rapeseed a crucial link, and the blooming Rapeseed Yellow in the rotation areas each spring became an iconic color of the British rural landscape. The yellow blocks in the distant views of Constable's landscape paintings are mostly rapeseed fields.

During WWII, rapeseed oil was massively expanded as a strategic material. The area of rapeseed fields in the Canadian prairie provinces tripled during the war. Pilot trainees, looking down from the air, used Rapeseed Yellow as an important reference for identifying man-made landmarks. Post-war, Rapeseed Yellow was officially designated by Canada as the official rapeseed color.

Contemporary eco-tourism has developed Rapeseed Yellow into a tourism resource. Wuyuan in China, Hokkaido in Japan, and the countryside of Provence in France all attract tourists with their rapeseed fields. Under drone aerial photography, Rapeseed Yellow has become the most popular spring color block on social media. An ancient agricultural color has made the leap from oil-pressing raw material to internet-famous landscape in the digital age.