South Red Agate Nine-tailed Fox Antique Pendant

The nine-tailed fox of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, in the Southern Mountains chapter, is not a lovable creature: on Mount Qingqiu there is a beast shaped like a fox with nine tails, whose cry is like a baby's, and which can eat people. The same book also says that eating its flesh keeps bewitchment at bay. Ancient monsters usually mix good and evil, and later impressions should not be projected back onto them. The nine tails appear only in this one passage, and later commentators read them variously, some as many descendants and some as long life.

The Han dynasty took the nine-tailed fox as an auspicious omen and painted it on stone reliefs beside the Queen Mother of the West, meaning that descendants would multiply. By the Ming and Qing, fiction had given it another face entirely. An image told for two thousand years, with that much reversal in it, is unusual. Makers of ornaments take one segment or another, and most take the auspicious one. On the reliefs the fox often appears alongside the three-legged crow and the jade rabbit, all attendants of the Queen Mother. For a subject like this, auspicious sells better than seductive.

The pendant takes the layering of the nine tails as its subject. The tails should lie one over another with the tips lifted, not stand as nine identical sticks. South Red Agate varies in depth of colour, so the carving follows it: dark at the root of a tail, pale at the tip, and the dimension appears by itself. Nine tails take more surface than the body, so the composition has to yield space in advance, and the direction must be consistent, since one tail turned the wrong way breaks the whole thing.

The antiqued finish darkens the recesses; the red of the stone is still there, just less strident. A sandalwood cord with an auspicious-cloud knot is the steadiest pairing, because the wood tone holds the red down, while a Chopard-style chain reads as more modern and suits a low neckline. Cord and chain can both be changed, and the hole is large enough that threading is easy; the edge of the hole should be chamfered, or it will fray the cord. The clasp on a Chopard chain is on the large side and looks clumsy with a small pendant, so choose a finer one.

South Red Agate is brittle, so don't store it loose with hard objects. The tips of the nine tails are the thinnest points, and one knock can chip them. Keep it in a box when it isn't worn, and a floating box is better because it suspends the piece instead of pressing on the carved face. Don't leave the box near a radiator, since dry heat is unkind to the stone. When you set it down on a table, push it in from the edge; the edge is where pieces die. A Chopard chain suits short hair, where it can be seen.