When I began choosing the first colours for the Ruyi, I suspected that Cinnabar and Jade would be easier to explain.
Cinnabar leads naturally into the history of red pigment, carved lacquer, ceremony, and the long cultural life of red in China. Jade begins with one of the most enduring materials in Chinese history and eventually leads back, unexpectedly, to 瑄, the character in my own name from which XU was drawn.
Earth seemed less obvious.
Someone looking at the handbag without knowing anything about its story might simply see a deep brown leather and assume that I included it because every collection needs a practical neutral. Brown is familiar, wearable, and easy to understand. It rarely requires an explanation.
That was precisely why I wanted to look at it more carefully.
By then, I had spent too much time questioning the reasons behind the Ruyi's silhouette, carving, proportions, hardware, materials, and other colours to treat brown as the option that existed simply because it was useful. I did not need every colour to carry an elaborate historical story, but I wanted to understand what this one contributed to the world of the Ruyi beyond being easy to wear.
I eventually called it Earth, 土, pronounced tǔ.
The most immediate meaning of 土 is soil or earth, but the word extends beyond the physical ground beneath us. Taiwan's Ministry of Education records meanings that include soil, land, territory, and one's native place, while Earth also appears within the traditional system known as the Five Phases, or 五行. The Ministry's Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants preserves the traditional explanation associated with the Shuowen Jiezi, in which 土 is described in relation to the ground from which living things emerge (Ministry of Education, Republic of China [Taiwan], 2021a, 2024).
I was drawn to that definition because it made earth feel less like passive matter and more like a beginning.
Brown is often treated similarly in fashion. It is described as neutral, practical, safe, versatile, or timeless, all of which can make it seem like the colour that exists quietly beside more expressive choices. Soil itself is so ordinary that we rarely stop to consider it unless something grows from it or someone begins transforming it into something else.
The history of clay gave me another way to think about that transformation.
By the Neolithic period, communities across different regions of China had developed distinctive pottery traditions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes how Yangshao potters in the Yellow River basin formed vessels using coils of clay, smoothing and shaping their surfaces before applying painted decoration. Other Neolithic communities developed different ceramic traditions, and pottery served both domestic and funerary purposes (Department of Asian Art, 2004).
What interests me about ceramics in relation to Earth is not simply that pottery is made from material taken from the ground. It is what happens between the material and the finished object.
Clay does not begin by appearing precious. It begins as earth that can be gathered, mixed with water, shaped through knowledge and human hands, dried, fired, and transformed into something capable of surviving for thousands of years.
Its significance does not depend on the rarity of the starting material.
It depends on what people know how to do with it.
That idea feels very different from some of the ways luxury is discussed today, where value can become closely associated with scarcity, exclusivity, or materials whose rarity is immediately understood. Earth suggested another possibility to me, in which something can begin as one of the most ordinary substances in the world and still become an object worth preserving long after the people who made it are gone.
That does not make rarity irrelevant, and it does not mean ordinary materials automatically become valuable through craftsmanship alone. What interested me was the reminder that value can also be created through knowledge, transformation, labour, function, and time.
Earth appeared in Chinese material history on a much larger scale as well.
At Yin Xu, the late Shang capital near present day Anyang, archaeological remains include extensive rammed earth foundations alongside traces of timber buildings, ancestral shrines, palaces, and other structures. UNESCO identifies rammed earth foundations among the significant architectural remains of the site, which dates to the late Shang dynasty beginning around the thirteenth century BCE (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, n.d.).
Learning about rammed earth architecture changed the scale of the idea for me.
The same broad category of material that could become a vessel could also become the ground beneath architecture. Earth did not need to appear precious in order to become essential. Its significance could come from what it allowed to exist above it.
That idea of foundation became one of the reasons I kept returning to 土.
The philosophical history surrounding Earth introduced another layer.
Earth is one of the Five Phases, or 五行, together with Wood, Fire, Metal, and Water. Although the term is sometimes translated into English as the “Five Elements,” scholars often prefer “Five Phases” because the system concerns processes, relationships, cycles, and transformation rather than describing five substances as static building blocks of the universe.
Different texts and traditions organized those relationships in different ways. In some Han period correlative systems, Earth occupied a central position in relation to the other phases. Discussions of texts such as the Chunqiu Fanlu show Earth participating in larger systems connecting direction, season, governance, cosmology, and processes of change (McLeod, 2022).
I was interested in the image of a centre because it offered another way of thinking about something visually quiet.
A centre does not need to be the most decorative part of a composition in order to matter. Its significance can come from relationship, organization, support, and the way other things are positioned around it.
However, this is also where the distinction between historical evidence and my own interpretation becomes particularly important.
The brown Ruyi is not historically “Earth coloured.”
Within traditional Five Phase correspondences, Earth was associated with yellow rather than the deep brown I chose for the handbag. Taiwan's Ministry of Education records this relationship in its entry for 土黃, tǔhuáng, and historical ritual systems likewise connected yellow with Earth. Qing imperial ceremonial wares, for example, employed different colours in relation to different ritual contexts, with yellow associated with ceremonies connected to Earth (Ministry of Education, Republic of China [Taiwan], 2021b; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
I think acknowledging that distinction makes the story more credible.
I do not want to take a contemporary brown handbag and claim that its exact colour possessed an ancient Chinese symbolic meaning simply because that explanation would make the product story sound more convincing.
Earth is XU's contemporary interpretation of 土.
The historical research explains why the idea of Earth became meaningful to me. The deep brown leather is my visual response to that idea rather than an attempt to reproduce a historically prescribed colour.
I chose brown because it brings me closer to earth in its most physical sense. I think of soil, clay, earthenware, mineral surfaces, and the depth of natural materials whose appearance is rarely one perfectly uniform tone. The colour allows the bag to feel grounded without becoming visually insignificant, particularly when the carved leather creates areas of shadow and the warm metal hardware introduces another material presence beside it.
That separation between history and interpretation is something I want to preserve throughout XU.
Research should give me somewhere real to begin, but it should not be stretched until every aesthetic decision appears to have been dictated by the past. Doing that would turn history into justification rather than inquiry.
I would rather be clear about which ideas are documented and which ones belong to me.
For the Earth Ruyi, the historical material led me toward questions of ground, transformation, architecture, land, and the Five Phases. From those histories, I began responding personally to ideas of foundation, material beginnings, and the possibility that something significant can emerge from something ordinary.
Those are my interpretations as a designer.
They are not definitions I am claiming every person in ancient China would have assigned to the colour brown.
Another meaning of 土 made the name feel more personal in a different way.
The Ministry of Education records 土 not only in relation to soil but also to land and territory, while compounds such as 故土, gùtǔ, can refer to one's native land or homeland (Ministry of Education, Republic of China [Taiwan], 2021a).
That meaning stayed with me because building XU has involved returning to a cultural history that had always been connected to me, even when I did not know how to read much of it.
For a long time, I was far more fluent in certain European luxury references than I was in the forms, materials, and objects embedded within Chinese history. I knew the names of European houses, recognized familiar silhouettes, and understood the visual codes that were supposed to communicate refinement because I had encountered them repeatedly enough to absorb their meaning.
By comparison, I could walk through a museum containing thousands of years of Chinese objects and understand remarkably little about what I was seeing.
Building XU has required me to return to that ground and learn it differently.
I do not mean returning in the sense of trying to reconstruct an idealized past or treating cultural heritage as somewhere I can simply go back to. Much of the history I am learning is unfamiliar to me, and the more I study it, the more aware I become of how complicated it is.
What feels like a return is the act of paying attention.
A character as apparently simple as 土 can open into histories of pottery, architecture, philosophy, territory, agriculture, ritual, and language. Something that initially looked like the quietest colour in the Ruyi collection became another reminder that familiar things often become more complicated when I learn how to look at them.
That is also why I would rather call the colour Earth than simply Brown.
Brown accurately describes what someone sees.
Earth explains where I began looking.
The name gives the colour a relationship with material and transformation without pretending that a deep brown handbag is an ancient Chinese symbol. Someone does not need to know anything about Neolithic ceramics, Shang architecture, the Five Phases, or the history of 土 in order to appreciate the colour. The handbag still needs to work in the present before anyone learns the story behind it.
As with the other Ruyi colours, I want the history to become another layer that appears through curiosity rather than something a customer is required to study before the design can make sense.
Someone might first choose Earth because they simply love deep brown leather. They may appreciate that it works with what they wear, notice how the carving becomes visible in different light, or prefer its warmth to Cinnabar and Jade.
If they later ask why XU calls it Earth, the answer becomes larger.
The colour also has a natural relationship with leather because leather is a material that changes through handling, environment, friction, light, and use. Conservation guidance makes clear that not all change should be romanticized as desirable patina, since leather can deteriorate when exposed to damaging conditions and proper care remains important (Canadian Conservation Institute, 2018).
What interests me is not the idea that damage somehow makes an object more meaningful.
I am interested in the fact that a material can participate in time.
A handbag can be cared for without being expected to remain permanently untouched. It can travel, be handled, accompany ordinary routines, and gradually become associated with the particular life in which it was used.
I explore that relationship between leather, time, and the evidence of a life more fully in “What We Carry.” Within Earth, what matters is that the material reinforces the same idea that first drew me toward the name. Something can remain grounded, useful, and materially honest without needing to appear pristine or spectacular in order to possess value.
Earth therefore occupies a different place in the first Ruyi palette from Cinnabar and Jade.
Cinnabar brings the history of red pigment, carved lacquer, celebration, auspiciousness, and a certain sense of ceremony. Jade begins with one of China's most enduring materials and develops an unexpectedly personal connection to 瑄 and the origins of XU.
Earth asks a quieter question about where value begins.
It begins with material that is common rather than rare, with clay before the vessel, with earth beneath architecture, and with land before anything has been built upon it.
That does not make Earth more important than the other colours, nor do I think it needs to carry some grand symbolic role as the foundation of the entire brand.
What I like is that it offers another perspective on value.
Something does not have to announce its significance immediately in order to matter. A material can seem ordinary until human knowledge transforms it. A structure can depend on something largely invisible beneath it. A familiar word can contain histories we have never thought to investigate.
The more I researched 土, the less interested I became in describing Earth as the practical neutral of the Ruyi collection.
Its quietness became the point.
For XU, Earth is my contemporary interpretation of material beginnings, transformation, foundation, land, and the depth that appears when we look more carefully at something we assumed we already understood.
I chose it because the first Ruyi palette did not need three colours competing to be the most extraordinary.
It needed room for the possibility that something can begin in the ordinary and become significant through what is made from it.