By the time I began choosing colours for the Ruyi, nearly every other part of the handbag had already been questioned repeatedly. I had spent months thinking about why the flap curved the way it did, how the carved clouds should move across the leather, how the proportions related to the historical ruyi, and what kind of metal finish belonged beside all of those decisions.
It felt strange to arrive at colour and suddenly treat it as something arbitrary.
I could have chosen a deep red simply because I liked the way it looked. There would have been nothing wrong with that. Colour does not always need a historical explanation in order to be beautiful, and I do not think every design decision needs to carry an elaborate story.
For this particular handbag, however, I wanted to know whether the colour could emerge from the same research that had shaped everything around it.
That search eventually led me to cinnabar.
Cinnabar is a naturally occurring mineral composed of mercury sulfide that was historically ground to create an intense red pigment. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art distinguishes naturally occurring cinnabar from synthetic vermilion while noting that both are forms of mercury sulfide. In Chinese material culture, cinnabar based reds appear across archaeological material, lacquer, painting, documents, and funerary contexts, giving the material a history that extends far beyond its usefulness as the name of a colour (National Museum of Asian Art, n.d.-a; National Museum of Asian Art, n.d.-b).
It is important to be precise about what that means for the handbag. The Cinnabar Ruyi does not contain cinnabar, nor is the name intended to suggest that it does. Historical cinnabar is a mercury bearing mineral, while the Ruyi is made from full grain leather coloured in a deep red that takes its name and visual reference from that material history.
The distinction matters to me because XU is not interested in reproducing historical objects or materials literally. The relationship is one of reference and translation, much like the relationship between the handbag and the historical ruyi itself.
What made cinnabar particularly compelling was not simply the mineral, but what happened when I began following the colour through the history of Chinese lacquer.
Lacquer has an extraordinarily long history in China. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that it was already known during the late Neolithic period and later developed into an important artistic medium. Mineral pigments could be incorporated into lacquer to create different colours, with carbon used for black, orpiment for yellow, and cinnabar for red. By the twelfth century, carved lacquer had emerged as a major luxury art form, and red lacquer coloured with powdered mercury sulfide became closely associated with what we now call cinnabar lacquer (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009).
The process of making carved lacquer interested me as much as the colour itself.
Carved lacquer was not simply an object that had been painted red and decorated afterward. Artisans gradually built multiple layers of lacquer over a supporting structure, sometimes applying dozens of layers and, in particularly elaborate examples, considerably more. Only after enough material had accumulated could the surface be carved into relief. The colour, material, depth, and carving therefore developed as parts of the same object rather than as separate decorative decisions (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009).
That relationship immediately made me think differently about the Ruyi handbag.
The Ruyi is not an imitation of carved lacquer, and leather behaves nothing like lacquer. The techniques, materials, and construction are completely different. What interested me was the unexpected relationship between a historical red deeply connected with carved surfaces and a contemporary handbag whose own visual identity depends heavily on carving.
The cloud forms on the Ruyi are carved into leather rather than lacquer, but learning about cinnabar lacquer made the red feel connected to the surface language of the handbag in a way that choosing an attractive shade from a colour chart never could.
The connection became even more specific when I discovered that cinnabar lacquer and the ruyi had historically existed together.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a ruyi sceptre from the Qing dynasty's Qianlong period made from cinnabar lacquer. That example does not mean that ruyi were characteristically red, because historical ruyi were created from many materials and appeared in many colours. Nor does one surviving object establish a universal relationship between cinnabar and the ruyi.
What it does show is that the material tradition, the colour, and the object that inspired the first XU handbag genuinely intersected within Chinese decorative history long before I ever thought about placing them together in a contemporary design (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
That discovery changed the way I thought about the colour.
Until then, I could easily have described the leather as oxblood. Visually, that description would not have been entirely wrong. The shade belongs to a family of deep, rich reds that can move between saturated red, wine, and brown depending on the light.
The problem was that Oxblood described what the colour looked like without explaining why it belonged to this particular handbag.
Cinnabar began to answer a different question.
It led back to a mineral that had been used to produce red pigment for centuries. It led into the history of carved lacquer and the enormous amount of labour required to build and carve those surfaces. It connected to a wider history of red within Chinese visual culture, and it eventually led back to surviving ruyi sceptres made from cinnabar lacquer.
None of those connections means that the Ruyi handbag is reproducing a historical cinnabar object. Together, however, they gave the colour a place within the same world of material history, carving, transformation, and interpretation that had already shaped the rest of the handbag.
The broader cultural history of red added another layer.
The National Museum of Asian Art describes red in China as an auspicious colour associated with life generating energy, celebration, prosperity, and good fortune, while also noting that the meaning of red has changed depending on context and historical period. In some settings it carried associations with authority and status, while in others it appeared within ceremonial, domestic, imperial, artistic, or celebratory life (National Museum of Asian Art, n.d.-a).
I think this is where it becomes especially important to resist reducing that history to the sentence that red simply means luck.
That explanation is easy to remember, but it compresses a vast visual and material history into a single symbolic definition. Red has appeared in Chinese culture through lacquer, ceramics, pigment, clothing, architecture, paper, ritual, celebration, imperial objects, and countless other contexts. The meaning of a particular red object depended on when it was made, how it was used, who encountered it, and what other ideas surrounded it.
I do not want XU to take thousands of years of cultural history and flatten them into convenient symbolism simply because a simpler story would be easier to place on a product page.
What interested me instead was the continuity of a colour repeatedly associated with vitality, auspiciousness, ceremony, prosperity, celebration, and visibility. Those ideas felt particularly appropriate beside 如意, an object whose own name expresses the sentiment of something unfolding according to one's wishes.
The relationship did not need to form a perfect historical equation.
I was not looking for evidence that a red ruyi had always meant one specific thing or that cinnabar belonged uniquely to this object. What mattered was that the history of the colour and the history of the form could meet without either one being invented for the sake of a marketing story.
Once I understood that, I began thinking about what I wanted the first Ruyi colourway to feel like in the present.
I wanted it to feel like a beginning.
The first XU handbag represents something that existed privately for years before another person could hold it. There were sketches, prototypes, failed samples, discarded ideas, manufacturing problems, research, revisions, and long stretches of uncertainty that existed before there was anything finished enough to show.
For something that represented the beginning of XU, I wanted a colour with warmth, presence, and a certain sense of occasion.
A muted neutral would have created a different feeling.
Cinnabar has enough depth that it does not feel temporary or playful to me, but it still carries the energy that first drew me to red. Depending on the light, the leather can appear richly saturated, move toward a deeper wine tone, or take on something closer to a mineral red. Beside warm metal hardware, the colour feels substantial, while the carved surface becomes more visible because light settles differently across the raised and recessed areas of the leather.
The colour participates in the structure rather than simply covering it.
That matters because I have never wanted XU to depend on a large logo to make an object noticeable. I would rather the silhouette, proportions, leather, carving, hardware, and colour work together strongly enough that someone notices the handbag before they know whose name is attached to it.
Cinnabar contributes to that presence.
It does not disappear easily into the background, but its significance also does not depend on another person understanding the historical reference. Someone can simply encounter it as a beautiful deep red. If they become curious about the name, another layer of the object begins to appear.
That is increasingly how I think about the role of history within XU.
The history should not be required reading before someone is allowed to appreciate the object. It should exist beneath the surface, available to anyone who wants to look more closely.
Choosing Cinnabar also changed the way I began thinking about colour more broadly.
Fashion often treats colour as one of the final stages of a product, something selected after the silhouette and construction have already been established. Colours can also become closely tied to seasons and trends, which means a shade that feels essential in one moment can quickly begin to feel dated in another.
I wanted the foundational colours of XU to come from somewhere deeper than that.
This does not mean the brand can never choose a colour simply because it is beautiful, nor does every shade need to be traced to an artefact or historical material. That would eventually turn research into its own kind of formula.
What I want instead is intention.
When a colour plays an important role in the identity of an object, I want to understand why it belongs there.
For the first Ruyi, Cinnabar survived that question.
The deeper I looked, the more the colour connected back to ideas that were already present in the design. It connected with carved surfaces, with Chinese material history, with the ruyi itself, with the cultural life of red, and with the sense of ceremony I wanted around the beginning of XU.
That process represents something important about the way I want the brand to work.
I do not want history to become a story attached to an object after all of the important design decisions have already been made. I want research to influence the decisions themselves while still leaving room for interpretation, instinct, and contemporary design.
History gives me something to respond to. It does not dictate the finished answer.
The Cinnabar Ruyi is therefore not attempting to become lacquerware, just as the handbag itself is not attempting to become a Qing dynasty sceptre. It is a contemporary leather object whose colour carries a memory of those materials, processes, and histories without pretending to reproduce them.
There is also something personal to me about beginning with this particular red because I think beginnings deserve a certain amount of ceremony.
The first XU handbag marks the moment when something that existed privately for a long time becomes something another person can carry. The name 如意 carries the idea of wishes, while Cinnabar carries a visual history connected with vitality, auspiciousness, celebration, material transformation, and objects made with extraordinary care.
Those ideas do not need to mean exactly what they meant in any single historical period for me to find something worth carrying forward from them.
I did not choose Cinnabar simply because red is considered lucky, and I did not choose it because the collection needed a statement colour. I chose it because the more closely I looked, the more the colour seemed to belong to the same conversation about history, material, carving, transformation, and intention that had already shaped the Ruyi.
For a handbag named after the sentiment “as you wish,” beginning with Cinnabar felt like a way of giving that first wish a sense of occasion as it finally became something real.