Flower symbolism appears on Chinese pottery dating to the Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 A.D.) and both the rose and chrysanthemum were originally herbs that the Chinese cultivated and refined over thousands of years. Associated with longevity because of its medicinal properties, people drank chrysanthemum wine on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month as part of the autumn harvest.

Around 400 A.D., Buddhist monks brought the chrysanthemum to Japan where it became the official seal of the emperor. By 1753 Karl Linnaeus, coined its Western name from the Greek words “chrysos” meaning gold, and “anthemon” meaning flower after seeing a poor specimen from China in the herbarium of fellow naturalist and world traveler Joseph Banks. Exactly a century later, when the U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry entered the Bay of Tokyo in 1853 and forcefully opened Japanese trade to the rest of the world, the exotic associations of the chrysanthemum transferred its meaning to Western decorative arts.