S925 Silver Five Spirits Barrel Bead Spacer

The five spirits come out of the five directions and the five phases: east and wood for the azure dragon, west and metal for the white tiger, south and fire for the vermilion bird, north and water for the black tortoise, with earth at the centre. Each direction gets a beast, and each beast a phase and a colour. The set was already tidy in the Han and was later applied to objects, buildings and military formations — a framework for sorting the world. The four images are all named in the Book of Rites: the vermilion bird in front and the black tortoise behind, the azure dragon to the left and the white tiger to the right.

This set offers five options: the water black tortoise, the wood azure dragon, the metal white tiger, the metal qilin and the fire vermilion bird. Four map onto the four directions, and the fifth uses the qilin to fill the centre. There is a folk tradition of the qilin belonging to earth, but it is looser than the four images, and this is one common arrangement rather than a rule. In the pairing of five colours with five phases white is metal, so the white tiger's attribution is not in question; classing the qilin under metal is how this particular set does it, and another maker might put it under earth.

The barrel bead is a cylinder, flat at both ends and drilled through. It sits more steadily than a round bead: it doesn't roll on the strand and its orientation is fixed, so the beast stays facing outward. That matters with a directional subject like the five spirits, because a round bead gradually turns its face to the inside of the wrist and the carving goes to waste. Mixing barrels with round beads gives a hard-soft rhythm that reads more clearly than a strand of rounds alone.

A spacer goes between the main beads. One on a strand is enough; more than that and the rhythm breaks up. Collecting all five into one strand works too, but then they are the main beads rather than spacers, and plain beads or flat discs need to come between them, or five beasts crowd together and none can be made out. The spacer should differ from the main beads by one step of brightness: too little and it disappears, too much and it intrudes.

The rims of a silver barrel need chamfering or they fray the cord. The cord passes through the hole, and if the mouth of the hole isn't rounded the cord folds at the same point over and over and breaks early. Worn five at a time, silver rubs against silver and the contact faces polish bright; there is no avoiding it, though the sound is a dull one and not unpleasant. Over months the ends of a barrel wear to a bright ring, which is simply the record of long contact with its neighbours.