Liyue Tariffs: Hydrangea

A monograph recording the local customs of Liyue Harbor. First compiled by Fadlan, a traveling Sumeru scholar sojourning in Liyue, then edited by many Liyue scholars, and widely published and circulated in Liyue.

—Hydrangea—

At wedding ceremonies for newlyweds in Liyue, the bride tosses a bouquet of hydrangeas toward the guests. Whoever happens to catch it is said to enjoy good luck for the whole year: merchants will prosper, the poor will find fortune and a turn of fate, unmarried men and women will meet a good match, and married couples will treat each other with true hearts, no longer stumbling and quarreling over daily life.

Hydrangeas vary in material—sometimes a ball of bound fresh flowers, sometimes a silk hydrangea woven of fine Silk Flower fabric; simpler households make them of colored paper or cloth. In Liyue, poor and rich alike delight in this custom.

As for its origin, some think it was influenced by the Windblume Festival customs of neighboring Mondstadt, the "Land of Wind"; others hold it began before the Archon War, in the age when the God of Salt walked Liyue's lands. She was one of the gods who stood side by side in Liyue, yet for her nature of excessive gentleness she was assassinated by her own followers and left the cruel Archon War too early.

Her resting place may well lie within the ruins Liyue people now call "Sal Terrae." According to a legend already warped beyond recognition, she once distributed flower balls to her people to bestow blessing... or at least a little comfort in a cruel age of chaos. After the God of Salt returned to the elemental cycle, her scattered people may have left this tradition to the people of Liyue; and Liyue folk, skilled in competition and fond of liveliness, reshaped the custom according to their own character.

Though the original intent of this custom was pure and joyful, in the safety records of Liyue's Millelith, injuries from scrambling for the hydrangea each year are not few—almost equal in number to cases of mountain monsters wounding people.