China breeds new species of flower named "Reimu"

[Lt Colonel Summers]

Totally not making that up! Here's the article (Its in Chinese, though). The news has apparently been around since September 19th last year, but only came into attention in Mainland China recently.

Basically, China's National Engineering Research Center for Floriculture announces that it has successfully bred four new species of flowers via crossbreeding two species of the Lagerstroemia Indica genus.
The name for one of them is literally "灵梦", the Simplified Chinese writing of Reimu. Not only that, the petals also happened to resemble Reimu's ribbon!
The Taiwanese forum where I discovered this article also has a comment on it saying: "Looked closely. Apparently the idea to name (the flower) Reimu is indeed related to Touhou. Looks like there are also Touhou fans in (China's NERCF)"

Speechless...
What's next? Cloning Reimu? (I made this same comment on said Taiwanese Forum too)

[niektory]

WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE

[aydensnake]

The name for one of them is literally "灵梦", the Simplified Chinese writing of Reimu. Not only that, the petals also happened to resemble Reimu's ribbon!

Well this is a nice suprise

Now to patiently wait for someone to name a species of flower after Remilia

[Hello Purvis]

So, has the big man commented on this?

[Lebon14]

So, has the big man commented on this?

If you are able to bring it to his attention...
Even then, I doubt he'll say anything about it.

[Dabighed]

I think the name's accurate because the petals really look like Reimu's bow 😂

[VTPHOENIX]

Well... I didn't expect there to be Touhou fans even in that strict China! What a surprise.  :]

[game2011]

Well... I didn't expect there to be Touhou fans even in that strict China! What a surprise.  :]

Touhou is very popular in China.  The official manga are localized there.

The belief that China banned Touhou for containing supernatural elements stems from someone in this forum saying the movies Ghostbuster 2016 and Suicide Squad did not get released there for containing supernatural stuff and would therefore affect Touhou.  However, supernatural movies like Warcraft, Dr. Strange, and Fantastic Beasts still saw Chinese releases, which either shows that the ban was lifted or being supernatural wasn't the only reasons for the bans.

Chinese people love it when foreign medias portray their culture, and since Touhou contains Chinese mythology...  Well, you get the idea...

[CenturyEgg]

Touhou is very popular in China. 

Can confirm, quite a few big name artists like Dantewontdie, Idealo and Neko (Yanshoujie) are also from China. Also, they have a large enough fanbase to sustain their own Touhou specific conventions, such as Tou Hou Only (THO). Based on my casual observations from online activity and being present at their conventions (Shanghai Comicup), they might actually have the largest Touhou concentrated Touhou fanbase outside of Japan.

[Tengukami]

Well... I didn't expect there to be Touhou fans even in that strict China! What a surprise.  :]

Welcome to Shrine Maiden!

[Hieda no Mukyu]

Also, they have a large enough fanbase to sustain their own Touhou specific conventions, such as Tou Hou Only (THO).

Indeed. As far as I know, one of the Chinese Tōhō conventions (cannot remember which one) saw the release of a very ambitious Chinese fan-made anime: ?秘封活動記録 ? The Sealed Esoteric History?. Regardless of what one thinks about making Tōhō animations, such an effort tells a lot about the volume of their fanbase.

[reimuhakurei32]

That is kind of funny... The flower was one of the nice kind that I see.

[aListers]

Will it be possible to buy seeds for this and grow them myself one day? I know I should be careful about importing other breeds of plants into a country but they seem like a good decoration.