When I began designing the Ruyi handbag, I knew I did not want to begin with a familiar silhouette and then search for something Chinese to place on top of it. That would have been the easier approach. I could have designed a conventional top handle bag, added a cloud motif to the flap, given it a Chinese name, and described the finished object as heritage inspired.
The problem was that the historical reference would have remained separate from the design itself. If I removed the carving, colour, name, and other immediately recognizable references, there would have been very little about the structure of the handbag that explained why the ruyi mattered in the first place.
I wanted to work in the opposite direction. Instead of designing the handbag first and adding history afterward, I wanted the historical object to participate in deciding what kind of handbag could exist.
The 如意, or ruyi, offered an unusually rich starting point because it was already an object with a history of transformation. The Palace Museum traces its development to a practical implement related to the zhaozhang, a claw shaped staff used in a way comparable to a backscratcher. By the Tang dynasty, the ruyi had begun moving away from this utilitarian predecessor and was increasingly valued for its form and associations. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, it became closely connected with auspicious wishes, court culture, display, and gift giving, while surviving examples were made from materials including jade, metal, bamboo, and wood (Palace Museum, n.d.).
The ruyi had therefore never been one completely fixed object. Its materials, purpose, context, and appearance had already changed over centuries, which became important when I began asking how its form could change again.
What first drew me visually was the shape of its head. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes a seventeenth century example attributed to Hu Wenming as having a cloud shaped head, while the Palace Museum notes that ruyi heads were often understood as resembling auspicious clouds or lingzhi. By the Ming and Qing periods, related ruyi cloud forms had travelled well beyond the sceptre itself and could be found in porcelain, furniture, garments, paper, and architectural details (Palace Museum, n.d.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.-a).
I became interested in what would happen if that curve stopped being something represented on the handbag and instead became part of the handbag's architecture.
Rather than embossing a small ruyi somewhere on an otherwise unrelated flap, I began using the curve of the historical object as the starting point for the opening of the bag itself. Once that decision was made, the rest of the design had to respond to it.
This was where something that looked relatively simple in a sketch became much more complicated in three dimensions.
A curve that feels balanced at the end of a sceptre does not necessarily remain balanced when it is enlarged across the width of a handbag. Some early versions became too round and gave the bag a softness that did not feel right. Others became too pointed and began losing the generosity of the original shape. Certain drawings looked elegant from the front but became awkward once the flap had to bend, close properly, and meet the side profile of an actual bag.
The process forced me to understand that translating a historical form into a new function could not mean copying it exactly.
The historical ruyi was made to be held, displayed, carried ceremonially, or given as an auspicious object, depending on its period and context. A handbag has an entirely different set of responsibilities. It needs to open and close repeatedly, hold its structure, accommodate belongings, sit properly on a surface, move against the body, and remain visually balanced from several angles.
Once the function changed, the proportions had to change with it.
What I wanted to preserve was not every historical measurement, but the quality that had made the form compelling enough to become the foundation of the design.
That question became increasingly important as the prototypes accumulated. Some versions stayed too close to the source shape and stopped behaving naturally as handbags, while others simplified the curve until very little of the original reference remained. I kept moving between those two extremes, trying to understand how much could change before the connection disappeared and how much could remain before the bag began to feel like a literal reproduction.
The final curve emerged from that negotiation rather than from an attempt to copy a single historical example.
The carving went through a similar process.
I did not want clouds to become an ornamental layer added simply because the flap needed decoration. The Palace Museum documents how extensively ruyi shaped cloud forms migrated across categories of Chinese design, appearing in furniture, porcelain, textiles, paper, and architecture. Learning this helped me see the motif less as something belonging exclusively to one kind of historical sceptre and more as part of a visual language that had already travelled between objects, materials, and functions (Palace Museum, n.d.).
I began thinking about how the carving could respond to the structure of the flap instead of sitting independently on top of it.
I tested different compositions, densities, depths, directions, and rhythms because I wanted the carving to follow the movement already created by the silhouette. Some versions became so dense that they competed with the form of the bag. Others were restrained to the point that the surface lost the sense of movement I wanted it to have. There were also designs I liked on their own but eventually removed because liking a detail was not enough reason for it to remain.
That process changed the way I think about decoration.
A detail can be beautiful and still not belong in the object.
I began asking whether removing an element would cause the handbag to lose something meaningful about its identity, structure, or story. If the answer was no, I had to consider whether the detail was actually contributing to the design or whether I was keeping it simply because I found it attractive in isolation.
That does not mean every visible decision needs an elaborate historical justification. Proportion, balance, function, and visual judgment are reasons in themselves. What matters to me is being able to understand why something survived the editing process.
The hardware presented another version of the same problem because metal changes the character of a handbag almost immediately.
Bright silver placed the Ruyi in a cooler visual world than I had imagined, while highly polished yellow gold felt more brilliant and jewellery like than the leather and carving seemed to require. I gradually moved toward a warmer metal finish because it sat more naturally against the leather and offered a subtle way to acknowledge the importance of bronze within Chinese material history without pretending that the hardware itself was an archaeological reproduction.
Bronze occupied a particularly important position during the Shang and Zhou periods, when it was used for ritual vessels, weapons, and chariot fittings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the Shang and Zhou eras as the Bronze Age of China and notes that bronze ritual vessels were deeply connected to the social and ceremonial structures of the cultures that produced them. Early Chinese piece mold casting also enabled highly intricate surface decoration, creating a particularly close relationship between material, structure, and ornament (Department of Asian Art, 2004).
I was not trying to turn the Ruyi handbag into a bronze vessel translated into leather, and I was not interested in reproducing the appearance of excavated bronze. The connection was more restrained. I wanted the hardware to have some of the warmth and material presence I associated with Chinese metalwork while remaining completely appropriate to a contemporary handbag.
This idea of referencing history without reproducing it became even more meaningful when I learned how often Chinese makers themselves had returned to earlier forms.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's research on Chinese bronzes produced between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries describes how later artists studied antique vessels and adapted their shapes and motifs into objects with different purposes, including incense burners, flower vases, and objects for the scholar's studio. Rather than treating all of these works as straightforward copies, the museum describes many as creative reinterpretations with their own aesthetic and functional identities (Lu, 2025).
That history gave me a useful framework for thinking about what I was doing with the Ruyi.
Respecting an older object does not necessarily require preserving it unchanged. A form can enter another material, a function can disappear, proportions can shift, and an old reference can become part of something with an entirely different purpose while still maintaining a relationship with what came before.
The body of the handbag went through the same kind of negotiation because changing one proportion rarely affected only one part of the design.
I wanted enough structure to give the Ruyi a sense of presence without making the bag feel severe. Widening the base helped ground the silhouette, but even a small change altered the way the flap appeared from the front. Raising or lowering the handle changed the relationship between the curved opening and the overall height of the bag. Increasing the depth affected how wide the body appeared when viewed head on.
Many of these decisions become almost invisible once they work.
That is one of the strange things about designing an object that eventually appears simple. Someone looking at the finished Ruyi will not see the version in which the handle felt slightly too small, the flap curve that looked almost right but continued to bother me, the carving that took days to refine before being removed, or the hardware finish that looked beautiful on its own and wrong the moment it was placed beside the leather.
The coherence of the finished object hides most of the work required to achieve it.
That is also why I wanted the XU Journal to preserve parts of the development process rather than presenting only polished campaign images.
The rejected versions explain the final design in a way that the finished handbag cannot explain by itself. Seeing multiple iterations of a curve or carving shows what I was trying to preserve, what I was willing to change, and where a particular decision finally found its balance. The value of showing that process is not that someone should be impressed by the number of hours or prototypes involved. It is that the progression makes the logic of the finished object easier to understand.
By the time the Ruyi reached its final form, the historical reference no longer existed in only one place.
It was not contained solely in the carving, the name, or the curve of the flap. The source object had influenced the architecture of the handbag, while the broader research surrounding Chinese material culture had begun affecting the metal, surface, proportion, and the way I thought about the relationship between ornament and structure.
That distinction matters to me because there is a meaningful difference between using heritage as decoration and allowing heritage to influence design.
Decoration can be added after an object is essentially complete. Structure cannot. If the historical reference is genuinely part of the architecture of the handbag, then removing the most obvious cultural motif should not erase every trace of the thinking that created it.
I want someone who knows nothing about the history of the ruyi to be able to look at the handbag and see an object whose proportions, materials, and details make sense on their own.
The history should never feel like homework someone needs to complete before they are allowed to find the bag beautiful.
Instead, I want the history to exist as another layer that becomes visible through curiosity. Someone might first notice the curve of the flap because they like the way it looks. Later, they might wonder why it has that particular shape, why the leather is carved the way it is, or why the bag is called Ruyi. The design should be able to stand on its own before the explanation arrives, while becoming richer once the explanation is known.
This is also why I never wanted the handbag to look like a replica of something ancient.
The Palace Museum's account of the ruyi describes an object that repeatedly changed over time, beginning with a practical predecessor and eventually becoming an increasingly refined and symbolic object whose cloudlike visual language travelled into many other areas of Chinese design (Palace Museum, n.d.).
Allowing that form to change again feels more faithful to that history than freezing it.
In the Ruyi handbag, the curve that once belonged to the head of a sceptre becomes the opening of an object intended to be carried every day. The cloud language that travelled across historical Chinese objects becomes carving in full grain leather, while warm contemporary hardware quietly draws from another part of Chinese material history without pretending to reproduce it.
The original function disappears, but the design logic continues.
That is what I mean when I say that the Ruyi was not created by placing history onto a handbag. I wanted history to participate in deciding what the handbag became.
For XU, that difference is fundamental because I do not want heritage to exist only on the surface of an object. I want it to be part of the reason the object has the form it does.