When I began choosing colours for the first Ruyi, I did not want to reach the end of the design process and suddenly begin thinking as though I were selecting paint swatches.
By that point, almost every other part of the handbag had developed through research and repeated decisions. The curve of the flap had grown from the form of the historical ruyi. The carved clouds came from studying the visual language surrounding that object. The warm metal finish developed through a broader interest in Chinese material culture, while the leather itself was chosen partly because I wanted the surface to participate in the life of the person carrying it.
Colour felt as though it should belong to the same world.
I did not think every shade needed an elaborate historical explanation, because sometimes a colour can simply be beautiful. For the first Ruyi collection, however, I wanted to understand whether the palette could grow from the same questions that had shaped the handbag itself.
That process eventually led me to Cinnabar, Jade, and Earth.
At first, they could easily be described as red, green, and brown. Visually, that would be accurate. What interested me was that each one led somewhere beyond colour.
Cinnabar led toward mineral pigment, carved lacquer, ceremony, and the long cultural history of red in China. Jade led toward stone, ritual objects, workmanship, changing ideas of value, and eventually toward 瑄, the character in my own name from which XU was drawn. Earth led toward soil, clay, architecture, land, foundation, and the material from which so many things begin.
The more I researched them, the less I thought of the palette primarily in terms of colour.
I began thinking about matter.
Cinnabar begins as mineral. Jade begins as stone. Earth begins with the ground itself. All three point toward materials taken from the natural world and transformed through human knowledge, labour, technique, and time.
That shared relationship became much more interesting to me than assembling a conventional seasonal palette.
I also want to be precise about what this relationship is and what it is not.
Cinnabar, Jade, and Earth were not a canonical trio within historical Chinese colour systems, and I am not claiming that ancient Chinese traditions grouped these three concepts together in the way XU does now. Their relationship as a palette belongs to XU and to the present.
What is historical is the material and cultural history behind each reference. What is contemporary is my decision to bring them together and allow those separate histories to shape the first visual world of the brand.
That distinction matters because I want research to influence the design process rather than become something attached afterward to make aesthetic decisions sound more meaningful than they were.
Cinnabar was the first colour that made that approach especially clear to me.
Cinnabar is a naturally occurring mineral composed of mercury sulfide that was historically processed into an intense red pigment. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art discusses the long history of mercury based reds in Chinese material culture, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art documents the particularly important relationship between cinnabar and carved lacquer (National Museum of Asian Art, n.d.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009).
That connection became relevant because the Ruyi itself depends so heavily on carved surface.
Historical carved lacquer was produced through a process completely different from leather carving, and the Cinnabar Ruyi does not contain cinnabar or attempt to reproduce lacquerware. What interested me was the relationship between a historically significant red pigment, an artistic tradition in which colour and carving became inseparable, and a contemporary leather handbag whose own identity also depends on what happens when material is carved.
The reference gave the red somewhere to come from.
It also gave me a reason to call the colour Cinnabar rather than simply Oxblood or Red.
Those other names could describe approximately what the leather looks like. Cinnabar explains more about why I wanted that particular kind of red to exist in the world of XU.
The full history behind that choice is something I explore more deeply in “Why Cinnabar.”
Jade entered the palette through a very different material history.
Jade has occupied an unusually long and important place within Chinese culture. The British Museum describes it as a material of exceptionally high value in China since ancient times, while surviving Neolithic jade objects demonstrate both the technical difficulty of working the material and the extraordinary amount of attention that generations of craftspeople invested in it (British Museum, n.d.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
That history interested me because jade is a material whose significance cannot be reduced to appearance alone.
Its toughness mattered. Its rarity mattered. The labour required to shape and polish it mattered. Over time, generations also attached philosophical, ritual, social, and aesthetic meanings to jade, although those meanings changed significantly depending on period and context.
I became interested in jade as an example of value that becomes deeper the more one understands the material.
Then the relationship became unexpectedly personal.
XU comes from 瑄, pronounced xuān, the second character in my Chinese name. Only after I had already begun building the brand did I discover that traditional lexicographical sources define 瑄 specifically as 六寸玉璧, a jade bi measuring six cun (Ministry of Education, Republic of China [Taiwan], 2024).
That discovery gave Jade a connection to XU that I had not originally planned.
I explore that story fully in “Origins of XU: How 瑄 Became XU,” because the relationship between 瑄, jade, the bi, and the name of the brand deserves more space than it can receive in an essay about colour.
Within the first palette, what matters is that Jade came to represent another way in which material history could influence a contemporary design choice without being reproduced literally.
The Jade Ruyi is made from green leather rather than nephrite, and I do not claim that the exact shade reproduces some historically definitive Chinese jade colour. Jade has appeared in many colours, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that pure white jade has historically been especially prized in China, despite green being particularly familiar to many contemporary Western audiences (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
Jade is therefore XU's contemporary interpretation of the material rather than an attempt to imitate stone.
I discuss that distinction more fully in “Why Jade.”
Earth required an even clearer separation between historical reference and contemporary interpretation.
The name comes from 土, pronounced tǔ, a character whose meanings include soil, earth, land, territory, one's native place, and Earth within the Five Phases. Traditional explanations of the character also connect 土 with the ground from which living things emerge (Ministry of Education, Republic of China [Taiwan], 2021a, 2024).
That made me think about brown differently.
Brown is often treated as the practical neutral within a collection. It is useful, familiar, and easy to wear, which can make it seem less conceptually interesting than red or green.
Earth gave me another way of seeing it.
Soil is ordinary because it is everywhere, but people have spent thousands of years transforming earth into things that outlive them.
Neolithic communities in China developed sophisticated pottery traditions by shaping clay into vessels for domestic, ritual, and funerary use. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes Yangshao potters forming vessels from coils of clay, smoothing their surfaces and then adding painted decoration, while other communities developed different ceramic techniques and visual languages (Department of Asian Art, 2004).
The starting material did not need to be rare for the result to become significant.
Knowledge transformed it.
That idea gave Earth a different place within the palette from Cinnabar and Jade. Cinnabar begins with an intense pigment. Jade begins with a material valued partly for its rarity and resistance. Earth begins with something common enough to exist beneath our feet.
Each one therefore opens a different conversation about material and value.
Earth is also the colour where I think historical precision matters most visibly.
Within traditional Five Phase correspondences, Earth was associated with yellow rather than the deep brown used for the Ruyi. Taiwan's Ministry of Education preserves this relationship directly in its entry for 土黃 (Ministry of Education, Republic of China [Taiwan], 2021b).
The brown Earth Ruyi is therefore XU's interpretation of 土, not a claim that this particular brown shade carried a universal historical meaning in Chinese culture.
I chose brown because it brings me toward the physical experience of soil, clay, earthenware, aged surfaces, and natural material. The research gave me a place to begin, while the final colour belongs to the present.
The full reasoning behind that choice appears in “Why Earth.”
Once I understood the three colours in those terms, the palette began to feel less like a collection of shades and more like a material landscape.
Cinnabar brings pigment and carved surface into the world of the Ruyi. Jade brings stone, workmanship, continuity, and an unexpected connection to the origins of XU. Earth brings soil, clay, land, transformation, and the idea that something significant can begin from something ordinary.
Together, they begin with matter before they become colour.
That is the relationship I wanted between them.
I was less interested in finding three shades that coordinated perfectly than in creating a palette with enough internal logic that I could return to it years later and still understand why each colour belonged.
Fashion will inevitably affect the way people experience colour. Certain shades move in and out of popularity, and XU does not exist outside those cultural shifts. I do not think a brand needs to pretend that its choices are somehow untouched by the time in which it operates.
What I wanted was for the first palette to have a reason to continue existing beyond one season.
The three colours also allow the same Ruyi silhouette to inhabit very different emotional spaces.
Cinnabar feels more immediate to me because its red carries warmth, energy, ceremony, and a sense of occasion. Jade feels more composed because of the qualities I personally respond to in its material history, including endurance, workmanship, and patience. Earth feels grounded and warm because its references begin with soil, clay, land, and foundation.
Those descriptions are my interpretations as a designer rather than historical definitions.
That distinction is important throughout the palette.
History gives me material to respond to. It does not dictate what the contemporary object must mean.
This is also why I think the first colours matter beyond giving someone three options to purchase.
A new brand does not yet have an archive.
There are no decades of campaigns, signature shades, recognizable materials, or repeated codes teaching people what the brand looks and feels like. The earliest decisions begin forming that vocabulary.
Cinnabar, Jade, and Earth are therefore not only colourways for one handbag. They are among the first pieces of the visual world XU is building.
I want that world to have a relationship with Chinese history without depending on the most obvious symbols of Chineseness (if that is even a word).
Someone does not need to know anything about cinnabar pigment, Neolithic jade, 瑄, pottery, or 土 in order to find one of the bags beautiful. The design should work before the explanation arrives.
The research exists underneath it.
If someone eventually becomes curious about why a bag is called Cinnabar rather than Red, Jade rather than Green, or Earth rather than Brown, I want there to be somewhere for that curiosity to go.
That is why the individual colour essays exist.
They allow someone to move from colour into material, from material into history, and from history back into the contemporary object.
The palette follows the same logic as the Ruyi handbag itself.
XU is not reproducing the source materials literally. Cinnabar becomes dyed leather rather than mercury sulfide pigment. Jade becomes colour rather than nephrite. Earth becomes brown leather rather than soil or clay.
The material changes.
What remains is the influence of what came before.
That is ultimately why these three colours came first.
Cinnabar, Jade, and Earth are not an ancient Chinese palette that I discovered and reproduced. They are three references I chose to place in conversation with one another because together they express something important about the way I want XU to approach history.
I want to begin with something real, understand it as carefully as I can, remain clear about where historical evidence ends, and then allow myself to interpret what that history might become within a contemporary object.
Before XU had an archive of its own, these three colours became some of the first pieces of the world I wanted it to inhabit.