Mu Xiaokui

The real culture behind it

沐 first meant washing the hair — the Shuowen jiezi glosses it 濯发 — and is also a surname with a wuxia echo: the household of the early Ming general Mu Ying, the 沐王府, plays a part in Jin Yong’s The Deer and the Cauldron. That link is ours, not an official one.

葵 was originally the mallow, ancient China’s staple green, which the Yuan agronomist Wang Zhen called the “lord of all vegetables” (百菜之主). Because its leaves turn toward the sun, poets made it a figure of devotion, as in Du Fu’s 葵藿倾太阳, “mallow and bean leaves lean toward the sun”; the sunflower, 向日葵, inherited the name later. With the affectionate 小, the name reads “little mallow” — to our ear, a plain, warm name in a cast of masks.