When I began looking for a name for XU, I did not want to invent something that merely sounded like a luxury brand. I wanted the name to come from somewhere I already had a relationship with, even if nobody else would understand that relationship at first.
I eventually found it in my own name.
My Chinese name is 芸瑄, and XU comes from the second character, 瑄, pronounced xuān. I did not use the entire romanization because I wanted the name to feel contemporary and visually distilled rather than like a direct transliteration. I reduced it to two letters and called the brand XU.
At the time, the decision felt personal more than historical. I knew that 瑄 was associated with jade, and that was enough to make the name feel connected to something deeper than a word I had invented for the sake of branding. What I did not understand was how specific that connection actually was.
I discovered that much later.
While researching Chinese objects and material culture for XU, I began looking more closely at the character itself. Taiwan's Ministry of Education Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants defines 瑄 as 六寸玉璧, a jade bi measuring six cun. The entry traces the definition through traditional lexicographical sources, including the later additions to the Shuowen Jiezi, where 瑄 is described as a six cun bi. It also cites historical passages in which 瑄玉 appears as jade presented in ritual offerings (Ministry of Education, Republic of China [Taiwan], 2024).
The Chinese Text Project preserves the same traditional definition. Its entry for 瑄 records the character as referring to a six cun jade bi and includes transmitted textual references to 瑄玉 in ritual contexts (Chinese Text Project, n.d.).
I had carried that character in my name for my entire life without knowing any of this.
The discovery led me toward the bi itself, a circular jade disc with an opening through its centre. Objects that scholars now classify as bi reach back into the Neolithic period. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a nephrite example associated with the Liangzhu culture and dated to the mid third millennium BCE. The museum notes that the rarity of the material and the quality of the workmanship suggest that objects of this kind may have played ritual roles or communicated wealth and prominent social status (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
The British Museum holds Liangzhu discs dating approximately to 3300 to 2200 BCE and is careful about how it describes them. Their original purposes are not known with certainty, although their archaeological contexts suggest ceremonial and possibly protective functions. They have been found in burials, sometimes in significant numbers, but much about what they meant to the people who originally made and used them remains beyond what we can confidently reconstruct (British Museum, n.d.).
That uncertainty is important because I do not want to collapse thousands of years of history into a convenient origin myth for a handbag company.
The Liangzhu artisans who created those ancient discs did not leave us a brand story explaining what XU should mean in 2026. The objects that archaeologists now call bi are far older than the later textual sources that define 瑄. I cannot claim that an ancient Liangzhu jade disc represented the values of XU, nor would I want to take an object whose original meaning remains partly unknown and assign it a modern symbolism simply because doing so would make the story more poetic.
What matters to me is something both narrower and more personal.
The character in my name has a documented historical definition connected to a jade bi, and the bi itself belongs to a much longer history of Chinese jade working and material culture. Those are real connections. Everything I choose to make of that discovery as a designer comes afterward.
That distinction between history and interpretation has become increasingly important to the way I think about XU.
When I began the brand, I knew that I wanted to explore Chinese cultural history through contemporary handbags, but I was still learning what that idea actually required. At first, I was looking outward. I was reading about objects, visiting museums, studying forms, examining materials, and trying to understand which parts of Chinese history could become the beginning of a contemporary design language.
I thought I needed to find the connection.
What surprised me was discovering that one of the most meaningful connections had already been sitting inside my own name.
There is something strange about realizing that a familiar character can contain a history you have never learned to read.
瑄 had always been there. I had written it, introduced myself with it, and understood it simply as part of who I was. The history did not suddenly appear when I researched it. I simply became capable of seeing something that had been present all along.
That experience began to mirror something much larger that was happening while I built XU.
For years, I could recognize many of the references associated with European fashion and luxury almost instinctively. I knew the houses, the silhouettes, the materials, and the objects I had been taught to consider important. Yet when I began looking closely at Chinese material culture, I realized how many objects from my own cultural history I did not know how to read.
Researching XU has therefore become more than searching for historical references that can inspire handbags. It has also become an education in learning how to look at things I once passed without understanding.
A museum object that might once have registered simply as a jade disc now makes me wonder about the material, the labour required to shape it, the archaeological context in which it was found, what later generations believed about it, and how its meaning changed over time.
The labour involved in ancient jade working makes that process particularly striking. The Met explains that jade objects of the Neolithic period required extensive sawing, grinding, and polishing with abrasive materials such as quartz and sand. The apparent simplicity of a smooth circular disc could therefore conceal an extraordinary amount of technical effort (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
I find that relationship between simplicity and effort deeply relevant to XU, although I want to be clear that this is my response to the history rather than a historical definition of what the bi meant.
The form itself can look almost elementary: a circle surrounding an opening. Yet behind that apparent simplicity are difficult material, accumulated knowledge, patient workmanship, and thousands of years of later interpretation.
That is the kind of value I am increasingly interested in. I am drawn to objects that do not need to reveal everything about themselves at first glance, because understanding them more deeply changes the way you see what was already there.
In some ways, XU developed through exactly the same process.
The two letters look simple. Someone encountering the name for the first time does not need to know anything about 瑄, jade, the bi, my Chinese name, or the history that eventually led me back to all of them. XU still has to function as a contemporary name on its own.
The history exists underneath it.
If someone becomes curious enough to ask where the name came from, another layer appears.
That is how I want the objects XU creates to behave as well. I do not want someone to need a history lesson before they are allowed to find a handbag beautiful. The silhouette, proportions, leather, carving, hardware, and colour need to work as design in the present.
The history should deepen the object rather than excuse it.
Someone might first notice the curve of a Ruyi handbag because they simply like the shape. Only later might they learn that the line began with the head of a historical ruyi. They might be drawn to the deep green leather without knowing why the colour is called Jade. If they look further, they may eventually arrive back at 瑄 and discover why jade occupies such an unexpectedly personal place within the world of XU.
I want that discovery to reward curiosity rather than demand prior knowledge.
The name itself has therefore become an example of the design philosophy I am trying to build.
XU is contemporary, but it has somewhere to come from.
It does not reproduce 瑄 visually, and I did not want the brand name to become a Chinese character placed prominently on every object simply to make its cultural identity obvious. Instead, the relationship is embedded more quietly. XU was distilled from 瑄, while the history behind 瑄 remains available to anyone who wants to understand what sits beneath those two letters.
There is also something meaningful to me about the fact that I chose XU before understanding the full connection.
It would be a tidier story if I could say that I researched ancient jade, discovered 瑄, understood its historical definition, and deliberately constructed the brand around it from the beginning.
That is not what happened.
I chose XU because 瑄 was mine.
Only afterward did I learn what I had chosen.
I prefer the truth because it reflects the way XU itself has developed. The brand has not emerged from a perfectly completed theory that I wrote down before designing anything. It has grown through research, questions, mistakes, discoveries, revisions, and moments when something I thought I understood revealed another layer.
Finding the historical definition of 瑄 was one of those moments.
It did not suddenly dictate what XU had to become, and I do not want the brand to turn the jade bi into a logo, a mascot, or a symbolic answer to every design question. If anything, the discovery reinforced the opposite instinct.
Chinese material culture is far too large and complex for one object to represent it.
The bi is one thread. The ruyi is another. Other objects, materials, technologies, and histories will lead XU somewhere else. What connects them is not that they all need to carry the same symbolism, but that I want to approach each one with enough curiosity to understand what it was before deciding what it might become now.
That is what XU has come to mean to me.
It began as two letters taken from a character in my name. Through research, those letters led me backward into jade, historical texts, ancient objects, and a cultural vocabulary I had not yet learned to recognize. At the same time, the brand is moving in the opposite direction, taking what I am learning and asking how those histories might continue into contemporary objects.
The movement goes both ways. I am looking backward in order to understand more clearly, while designing forward so that the past does not have to remain only something I encounter behind museum glass.
I think that is why discovering the meaning of 瑄 affected me as much as it did.
I had begun XU believing that I was searching for a way to carry Chinese history into something new. The more I researched my own name, the more I realized that the relationship was not quite so one directional.
Some part of that history had already been carried to me.
XU began when I took 瑄 and distilled it into two letters. Only later did I understand that those two letters were carrying far more than I knew.