As I visit many places, I notice that colors represent different meaning in different countries. It's probably caused by different historical and traditional perception about colors. For example, Chinese people regard red color as fortunate color that brings them luck. So, on happy holidays, Chinese people decorate their places with reddish papers. Also for the wedding contratulatory money, Chinese people use red envelopes. Also, yellow color represents wealth to Chinese people. There is a hypothesis, saying that the meanin of wealth for yellow color originated from the Yellow river in China. Because the region near the Yellow river in China has been always affluent, people associate the color yellow with the wealth. Korea, the neighboring country of China, also regard yellow as wealth. But in Korea, it's not because of any river, rather it's because the color of gold is similar to yellow. (Simple, huh?) Contrast to Chinese people, Korean people don't like write something in red color. Particularly, they hate writing someone's name with red color. The logic behind is, again, very simple: It's because the color of blood is red, and writing someone's name with red ink, and somehow Korean believe that red inked name will bring the person bad luck. Besides from country to country difference, colors are also used to represent continents. For instance, think of the Olympic rings.
It's consistd of five different colors, and the five rings represent each continents in the world: Blue for Europe, Black for Africa, Red for America, Yellow for Asia, and Green for Australia continents.
Furthermore, some libraries in the United States use different color to classify books these days. Generally, purple and orange are regarded as mystery series or holy, religious volumes. And yellow is used to indicate books that are enlightening. (It kind of makes sense since 'yellow' gives you sense of brightness. Isn't it?)
Aside from Asian countries, America and international organizations, Europe also has various meanings to each colors. Let's take a quiz about colors in Germany, one of the representative countries in Europe!
