Choose your version: the simple white-robed Guānyīn 观音 aka the Goddess of Mercy (shown here) or the complex thousand-armed bodhisattva, able to reach out to help many people. The Goddess of Mercy carries a willow branch (symbolizing adaptability) and a vase of water (the dew of compassion), though in a crunch, you could probably get away with a house plant.
Halloween is coming fast! Is your costume ready? To kick-start your creative process, here’s our shortlist of five Chinese culture-inspired Halloween costumes guaranteed to spark interest at parties, or at least generate a few good laughs while you’re trick-or-treating.
1. The Great Wall
The perfect ensemble costume for going out as a group. Come with 3 friends or 33 friends. Enter together or arrive separately. It doesn’t matter. After all, the original Great Wall 长城chángchéng wasn’t a continuous flow of bricks.
Talking points, in case they ask:
Qin Shihuang, the first Emperor of a unified China, didn’t build the first wall. Rather he connected (and knocked down) separate Warring States walls, plus added new ones, made mostly of stones and packed earth.
The majority of the modern Great Wall was constructed 1500 years later during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) to prevent nomadic invasions.
The Great Wall in total measures 21,196 km (across 9 provinces).
Originally a male bodhisattva called Avalokiteshvara, Guan Yin became the female personification of compassion around the 12th century. In English, she is often called the goddess of mercy.
European Thousand Armed Classical Structure (2013-2014) by Shanghai-born artist Xu Zhen is a larger-than-life-size installation of glass-fibre-reinforced concrete, marble grains, marble, and metal. The artist duplicated and arranged iconic Western sculptures in a symmetric line behind the classical Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, to create a semblance of the thousand-armed form of the Chinese goddess of compassion, Kuan Yin.
