Where did these flowers come from? They have been traced back to the poet Allen Ginsberg and his November 1965 call for “Masses of flowers – a visual spectacle” to be arranged at the frontline of protests. But ten years earlier, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the power of flowers had already been put to work. In fact, it was the potency of the flower in China, its ability to do things, to move, and to move people, that not only foreshadowed but had helped inspire Ginsberg and his movement. And it was Mao, not Ginsberg, who Hoffman cited in the last sentence of the quote above. In China, in the years 1954–58, floral arrangements, motifs, illustrations, fashion, and even architectural decoration, were to be found in virtually every sphere and level of society. Flowers decorated the stage as Chairman Mao spoke to the political elite; they appeared not only in newspaper headlines, in the decorative illustrations of magazines and journals, in cartoons, in song, and in poetic paeans to the young nation, but also in private diaries and letters and in poetry and big-character posters (dazibao 大字報) expressing dissent and anger. Where did these flowers come from?