S925 Silver General Wenzhe Talisman Enamel Open Ring

The sixty sexagenary pairs are matched to sixty year-gods, one on duty each year. General Wenzhe, in Daoist usage, is one of the sixty. Which year he corresponds to varies between the tables in different books, and I won’t pronounce on it. In Daoism the year-god is the deity of the year in office, and the custom of paying respects to it exists everywhere; in a year that clashes with it you go to a temple to have the clash resolved, and the rule is firmly established in folk practice. The days for it fall mostly at the start of the year, when the queue at a temple can take a whole day, and what people go for is peace of mind.

The face of a talisman ring usually carries a complete talisman: head, belly and foot, all three parts. Shrunk onto a ring face, the foot is often cut away, because the face is curved and the closing stroke won’t fit. A talisman with its foot cut off is incomplete in the eyes of anyone who cares. Sellers don’t always mention it and buyers don’t always mind; it is enough to know.

Enamel is glassy glaze ground to powder, packed into cells in the metal and fired. Each firing shrinks it, so two or three passes are needed to fill it level. Silver melts low, so the heat has to be held down when enamel is fired; a little high and the silver softens. Judge the finished piece in two places: whether the glaze has pinholes, and whether colour has run at the boundaries. Pinholes mean the heat wasn’t controlled, which is not a fault exactly but a trace of the making. Among enamel colours, blue and green are hardest to fire evenly, red is the most delicate and goes black at a slight difference in temperature. The yield on silver-bodied enamel was never high.

It is filed under pendants, but the object is a ring. The category was set wrong when the listings were built, and correcting it means touching a batch of data, so it stays as it is for now. If you came in through the pendant category and found a ring, don’t assume the wrong item was sent. Mis-filing like this is not rare in small shops, and I would rather say so than have you ask back and forth.

Enamel chips and a chip cannot be filled. Keep it away from hard objects and don’t wear it doing housework. A dull silver band can be polished; the enamel face can only be pressed with a soft cloth, never rubbed with a polishing cloth, since the abrasive will cloud the glaze, and once clouded it won’t come back to its first brightness. Adjust the open band until it is comfortable and stop there; don’t over-bend it for the sake of getting it off. A year-god talisman is a year’s protection to those who believe and a pattern to those who don’t, and either way of wearing it holds.