S925 Silver Treasure Bowl Bagua Spacer

A spacer bead is the piece that sits between the main beads of a strand. It is smaller than they are, and its job is to divide the strand into sections and, incidentally, to adjust the fit. On a long 108-bead strand the spacers usually go at the 27th, 54th and 81st beads, making four sections that are easier to count while reciting. On a long strand, when your fingers reach a spacer you know at once which section you are in. Short strands are less strict: two sections or three, whatever suits the hand.

The pattern here is the treasure bowl. In folk legend Shen Wansan owned such a bowl, and whatever went into it multiplied; the story travelled widely and the image fixed itself: wide mouth, rounded belly, rim turned out, ingots piled inside. Made into a spacer bead, the depth of the bowl can only be suggested by the raised rim, and the pile is compressed into a few small bumps that read as an uneven surface from a distance. The ingots are heaped to the rim, as if about to spill.

The other face carries the bagua. On a spacer the bagua usually goes on the side, not the front. The eight trigrams run right round, with a little space left at the join so the arrangement does not look crammed. The raised surfaces are polished and the hollows left dark, so that as the bead turns the light alternates and the lines of the trigrams keep moving. The lines are fine and the bead is small; eight of them crowded together blur easily. A raised yang line wears better than an incised yin line.

How many to use? On a single-circuit bracelet, one or two is enough; any more chops the strand into fragments. The count is usually odd — three, five — which is habit rather than rule. Dark wooden beads or coconut shell are the safe pairing; turquoise or South Red agate will also lift it, as long as you keep to three colours at most. If the spacer is too close in colour to the main beads, the division stops reading. With three spacers, keep the intervals equal.

The hole has to be drilled straight; off-centre, and the whole strand spirals as it hangs. The hole edge is a wear point: the cord rubs back and forth and in time cuts a groove. When the edge goes bright and the cord furs, it is time to restring. To clean the silver, pinch it in a cloth and turn it once; do not poke a pin through the hole, since every poke adds a scratch. A silver spacer rolling among beads will polish a bright ring into the wooden ones beside it.