When I began choosing the first colours for the Ruyi, I knew I did not want them to exist simply because they looked beautiful together.
By that point, nearly every other part of the handbag had 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, what kind of metal finish belonged beside them, and how the proportions of the handbag could retain a relationship with the historical ruyi without reproducing it literally.
Colour felt as though it deserved the same consideration.
That did not mean every shade needed an elaborate historical explanation. Sometimes a colour can belong simply because it is beautiful. For the first Ruyi collection, however, I wanted to understand whether the colours could emerge from the same world of materials, objects, and histories that had already shaped the handbag itself.
Jade became one of the most natural places to begin.
Jade has occupied an unusually long and important place in Chinese material culture. The British Museum describes it as a material of exceptionally high value in China since ancient times and notes that its combination of toughness and translucence allowed craftspeople to transform it into ornaments, ceremonial weapons, ritual objects, and many other forms over thousands of years (British Museum, n.d.-b).
Some of the earliest surviving Chinese jade objects come from Neolithic cultures, including the Liangzhu culture, which produced the circular discs that later came to be known as bi, or 璧. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates one of its Liangzhu jade bi to the mid third millennium BCE and explains that objects of this kind were made primarily from nephrite, a material that was highly valued in China. Their rarity, workmanship, and appearance in elite burials suggest associations with ritual activity and prominent social status, although their precise meanings in their earliest contexts cannot always be recovered with certainty (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
That uncertainty is important to me because jade has accumulated so many meanings over such a long period of time that it can be tempting to reduce the entire history to a few convenient symbols.
I do not want to say that jade simply meant purity, virtue, protection, wealth, or any other single idea throughout Chinese history. Jade objects existed across different periods, regions, social contexts, and functions, and their meanings changed alongside them. The British Museum is similarly cautious when discussing Liangzhu bi, noting that although archaeological contexts suggest ceremonial and possibly protective functions, their original purposes remain uncertain (British Museum, n.d.-a).
I find that complexity much more interesting than a neat symbolic definition.
What we can understand more clearly is the extraordinary amount of human effort involved in transforming jade into finished objects.
Jade is an exceptionally resistant material. The Metropolitan Museum of Art explains that Neolithic jade working required extensive sawing, grinding, and polishing using abrasives such as quartz and sand. A form that appears remarkably simple when viewed in a museum today could therefore have required immense patience, technical knowledge, and time to produce (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
That relationship between simplicity and effort is one of the things I respond to most strongly.
A jade disc can appear almost elemental in its geometry. There may be nothing immediately dramatic about the form, yet the apparent simplicity conceals the difficulty of the material, the knowledge required to shape it, and the amount of labour contained within its surface.
I think about handbags in a similar way.
A finished object can look inevitable once all of the decisions have been resolved. The curve appears as though it could never have been another shape. The handle seems to sit exactly where it should. The proportions feel natural enough that nobody looking at the finished handbag needs to think about how many versions were rejected before those relationships began to work.
Good design can conceal the difficulty that produced it.
Jade made me think more carefully about that kind of value, particularly the difference between something that announces its complexity immediately and something whose depth becomes more apparent once you understand how it came to exist.
Over time, jade also accumulated cultural meanings that extended beyond rarity, craftsmanship, and social status. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that jade became associated with qualities such as purity and moral rectitude in Chinese culture. The physical properties of the material contributed to those associations, as its toughness, polished surface, translucence, and resonance were connected by later thinkers with qualities admired in human character (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
I do not interpret that history as evidence that every jade object carried the same meaning, or that those historical associations can simply be transferred onto a contemporary handbag.
What interests me is the relationship between material and meaning itself.
Jade was not valued only because people decided that a particular colour was beautiful. Its physical qualities mattered. Its rarity mattered. The difficulty of shaping it mattered. The workmanship invested in it mattered. Over generations, those qualities accumulated cultural associations that extended far beyond appearance alone.
That distinction became important when I began thinking about Jade as a Ruyi colour.
I did not want Jade to exist simply as the green option in the collection.
The colour is beautiful, but what made it relevant to XU was the material history sitting behind the name.
At the same time, I had to be careful about what exactly I was claiming.
Historical Chinese jade was never limited to the deep green that many people now instinctively associate with the word. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that although green jade is particularly familiar to Western audiences, pure white jade has historically been especially prized in China (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
The green leather of the Jade Ruyi therefore does not claim to reproduce some historically definitive colour of Chinese jade.
It is a contemporary interpretation.
The handbag is made from full grain leather, not stone, and I am not trying to make the leather imitate jade so convincingly that the distinction between the materials disappears. Nor am I suggesting that a green handbag somehow inherits every cultural meaning that has ever been associated with jade.
The relationship is more restrained than that.
I am interested in what happens when the history of one material begins influencing the feeling of another.
For the Ruyi, that meant choosing a deep green that could carry some of the visual presence I associate with jade while still behaving completely as leather. The colour changes with light, interacts with the carving, and develops its own relationship with the warm metal hardware. It belongs to a contemporary handbag first.
The history exists beneath the choice.
This is also where Jade becomes unusually personal for XU.
The name XU comes from 瑄, pronounced xuān, the second character in my Chinese name, 芸瑄. Only after I had begun building the brand did I discover that 瑄 has a much more specific historical relationship with jade than I originally understood.
Traditional lexicographical sources define 瑄 as a jade bi measuring six cun, which created an unexpected connection between the name I had carried throughout my life and the Chinese material culture I was beginning to study through XU (Ministry of Education, Republic of China [Taiwan], 2024; Chinese Text Project, n.d.).
That story deserves more space than it can receive in an essay about colour, which is why I explore it fully in “Origins of XU: How 瑄 Became XU.”
What matters here is what that discovery changed about Jade.
I had already been interested in jade because of its material history, craftsmanship, and extraordinary continuity within Chinese culture. Discovering the historical meaning contained within 瑄 made the relationship feel considerably closer.
Jade was no longer simply a material I was studying from the outside.
It had unexpectedly led back to the name of the brand itself.
That realization did not mean Jade suddenly became the symbolic colour of XU, nor do I want to build the entire identity of the brand around one historical material. Chinese material culture is far too large and complex for that, and XU is meant to continue exploring many different objects, materials, technologies, and histories.
What the discovery did was give this particular colour an unusually natural place within the first collection.
Cinnabar and Jade also create very different emotional responses for me.
Cinnabar has a certain immediacy. Its red carries warmth, energy, ceremony, visibility, and a sense of occasion. Jade feels more composed, although I want to be careful not to suggest that composure was some universal historical symbolism attached to green jade.
That is my interpretation as a designer.
When I think about Jade within XU, I think about endurance, workmanship, patience, material resistance, and the ability to transform something difficult into something refined. Those ideas come from what I personally respond to in the history of jade rather than from a claim that one green colour represented those concepts throughout ancient China.
Maintaining that distinction matters to me.
One of the things I want XU to become better at over time is separating documented history from contemporary interpretation. Research gives me something to respond to, but it should not be stretched until every aesthetic decision appears to have been historically predetermined.
The past provides material for the conversation. The contemporary object still needs to become something of its own.
That is why calling this colour Jade feels different from simply calling it green.
Green would describe what someone sees.
Jade explains where I began looking.
The name leads toward a material valued in China for thousands of years, toward objects whose apparent simplicity concealed extraordinary labour, toward changing ideas about value and character, and eventually toward 瑄, the character from which XU itself was distilled.
Someone carrying the handbag does not need to know any of that in order to appreciate the colour.
The history should never become homework required before the object can be beautiful.
I would rather the handbag work in layers. Someone may first see a deep green leather bag and be drawn to its colour. They may later become curious about why it is called Jade. From there, they may learn something about Chinese jade working, the history of the bi, or the relationship between 瑄 and the name XU.
The meaning becomes available through curiosity.
That is increasingly how I want the entire brand to work.
The objects should belong completely to the present while containing enough history beneath their surfaces that looking more closely changes what you see.
Researching Jade also reminded me that learning about cultural history does not always mean discovering something entirely foreign. Sometimes it changes your relationship with something familiar.
I had seen jade throughout my life. I knew it mattered within Chinese culture. I knew that 瑄 was part of my name. Those pieces existed separately in my mind until building XU forced me to look at them more carefully.
The history had not been hidden from me.
I simply had not yet learned how to read the connections between those things.
That experience has become one of the most meaningful parts of building XU. Historical objects that I might once have passed quickly in a museum now make me stop and ask about their materials, proportions, purpose, construction, and the people who made them. Familiar characters have begun revealing histories I did not know they contained.
Jade belongs among the first Ruyi colours because it sits naturally within that process of looking again.
It is not there because every collection needs a green handbag, and it is not there because jade provides an immediately recognizable way to make something feel Chinese. It belongs because the material itself opened a path into questions about workmanship, value, history, and interpretation, while unexpectedly leading back toward the name XU.
The Jade Ruyi remains a contemporary leather handbag. It does not attempt to become an ancient jade object, and it does not borrow the authority of thousands of years of history simply by adopting the name.
What it carries forward is more modest.
It begins with attention to a material that has mattered for an extraordinarily long time, responds to the qualities and histories I find meaningful within it, and allows those ideas to influence a new object without pretending that the new object is the same as what came before.
For me, that is enough reason for Jade to belong.