Nine-tailed Fox Pendant

The nine-tailed fox was not a monster in the earliest Chinese texts. The Classic of Mountains and Seas, in its chapter on the southern hills, describes the Qingqiu mountain and a creature there, “shaped like a fox with nine tails”, whose voice is like a baby's. Read the passage closely and you notice the tone: it is a record, not a verdict. Nine tails simply meant a rare animal. On Han dynasty stone reliefs the same beast sits beside the Queen Mother of the West, lined up with the jade rabbit, the toad and the three-legged crow, in the place kept for auspicious creatures. The man-eating seductress came much later, added layer by layer in fiction after the Tang. That is a different animal.

The pendant takes the fox lying down. Nine tails spread out behind it into a fan, each tip lifted a little higher than the last, so from the front the tails fill most of the face and the head has been kept deliberately small. The eye is a shallow groove with no pupil cut into it. The proportion earns its keep in the hand: from a distance you see a rhythm of lines, and only up close does it resolve into a fox rather than a cat. The back is flat and sits comfortably against skin, the edges are softened so there is no thin-blade feeling, and the piece is thin enough not to show under clothing.

Guo Pu, annotating the same book in the Jin dynasty, wrote that the creature “appears in times of peace, as an omen”. That line set the tone for everything painted afterwards. Not a spirit. A portent. Which is why the nine-tailed fox has always had two uses among ordinary people: embroidered large on bed curtains, or made small and carried on the person. The first is for show. The second is for the wearer alone, and it is the one this pendant belongs to.

On a collarbone chain the pendant lands just below the collarbone and the fan of tails opens at exactly the right width. On a cord it reads a little wilder, and it sits well on men without any awkwardness. The motif itself is soft. It holds its own against dark clothing; worn over pale colours it starts to look bitty, which is my own impression after trying it and not a rule for everybody. If you layer, keep it away from another fully patterned plaque. Two masses of line side by side and neither one reads.

Metal does not mind being worn. It minds being put away. Left out, it meets air and sweat, dulls, and the recesses go dark first. A soft brush worked along the direction of the tails lifts the dust that has settled in them. Skip the toothpaste. The grit is too coarse and it will scratch that even dark layer into a mess. Press the piece dry with a cloth after wearing, take the sweat off, and you have done more than any care product will do for it.