A Flower For A Suite! How Is The World's Most Valuable Flower Made?

If a tulip bulb and 8 pigs + 4 cows + 12 sheep + 24 tons of wheat + ...... a boat were placed in front of you, what would you choose?

With simple math, I believe 99.9999% of people would have decided to go with the pigs, cows and sheep.

But for the Dutch in the 17th century, this choice was quite indecisive.

A bulb not as big as a fist could be compared to a suite in the third ring road of Beijing in the minds of the 17th century Dutch.

You think it's a fantasy, but this is the earliest economic bubble in history, the 17th century in the Netherlands, both its economy and art, have ushered in its golden age.

The rich were throwing away endless amounts of money, and the common man was eyeing any opportunity to rise to the top.

At this time, tulips entered their vision.

At the time, a single tulip bulb sold for more than ten times the annual income of a skilled artisan, with tulips such as 'The Viceroy' selling for between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders per bulb (depending on weight).

At the height of the tulip mania, a single 'The Viceroy' could be worth more than 4,500 guilders, while a skilled artisan could earn around 300 guilders a year.

After a few rounds or even dozens of resales, the hottest tulip bulbs could buy a property, attracting even more speculators.

"A tulip merchant can earn hundreds or thousands of guilders from buying and selling a single tulip, and in a year or two can amass a bookkeeping fortune of 400,000 guilders or even 600,000 guilders."

Seeing it rise high, the tulip is like a great beautiful bubble, refracting the illusion of light, guiding enthusiasts and speculators to fall deeper and deeper into it.

In the middle of the 16th century, the tulip was introduced to France from the Near East and Eurasia, where it originated, and then attracted the attention of all Europeans.

The tulip, already a rare novelty because of its small numbers, was far from a frenzy until the emergence of a color-shattering virus.

Some tulip bulbs infected with broken color virus, the petals began to appear irregular broken pattern, magnificent metallurgy is different, they quickly become popular, become the object of everyone's pursuit.

The virus is a random infection, and when the tulips are still bulbs, you never know which ones will develop that pattern.

The random event + scarcity of numbers certainly has a fatal attraction for some people who like to hunt.

The root of this is that tulip bulbs are very easy to reproduce, and the influx of speculators has made the supply of bulbs exceed the demand, and people are no longer willing to pay a fortune for them.

Fortunately this economic "collapse" did not kill the Netherlands as rumored, as it was only a very small part of the economy at the time.

Anyway, everything went back to normal, the price of tulips became normal, and only the florists and growers became the unlucky ones who had to suffer.

And no longer "beautiful", down from the altar of the tulip, this rooted in the daily life of the Dutch people.

It is also from the Dutch golden age of a piece of glass, gradually become a national symbol.

Today, hundreds of years later, it is still one of the most popular bulbous plants, and in recent years it has become a limited protagonist every spring.

The tulip says: "That's all in the past! I'm still a hot mess~

With the advancement of breeding technology, hybrid tulip species have gradually become more numerous, and more and more people are realizing tulip freedom. Sojourner has many perspectives and interpretations of tulip mania to this day. But when we go through the fog of history, back to the first broken color tulips in Holland bloom that moment, all the surrounding noise still, the origin of all is just the most genuine worship of beauty and submission.

This kind of emotion is enough to cross the ancient and modern times, so that we planted tulips at this moment, and hundreds of years ago an ordinary Dutch flower-viewing people, to produce some hidden and great spiritual resonance.

I'd like to end with a quote from Mike Dash in Tulip Fever:

"If there is anything like the tulip that makes weavers richer than spice merchants, and orphans so rich that they don't have to work for the rest of their lives, even if it's just a flash in the pan, and even if it's not the real cause of the miracle, it's enough to make a man's heart sing."