White Copper Fu Character Doll Pendant

The formal language of the fu doll is unlike that of Buddhas or deities. Big head, short body, limbs drawn in, features crowded into the middle of the face with large empty areas left around them. On a real person those proportions would be deformed; on a doll they are charming. In metal, the hard part is keeping the dopey quality: cut the eyes too large and it looks fierce, too small and it looks blank, and a hair’s difference in the curve of the mouth changes the whole face. The ears have to be thick as well — thin ones look like two leaves stuck on.

The Huishan district of Wuxi produces clay figures and was already well known in the Qing. Its most famous figure is Da A’fu: round face, big ears, sitting cross-legged with a small beast in its arms. There are several accounts of where it came from, all of them connected with guarding a house and protecting children. Clay figures were originally toys, pinched solid so they would not break, and brightly painted. Later they became a fixture of the New Year, valued for that blunt, good-natured look.

Putting the character and the doll together sets a word beside a shape, both saying the same thing. The character sits on the plaque and the doll beside it, or the doll holds a small fu plaque; both arrangements are common. The character must be upright and the doll slightly tilted — one straight, one leaning, and the picture is not stiff. That pairing of upright and tilted is everywhere in folk New Year prints. With the body slightly off-centre and the character dead centre, the eye lands on the character first and the face second, and it takes two passes to see the whole thing.

Silver and gold versions. Silver is cool, and the doll’s face comes out plain and quiet; gold is warm, like a painted clay figure, and carries more of the New Year. The workmanship is the same in both, only the surface treatment differs. Both darken with wear — gold toward brown, silver toward grey. Choose by the tone of what you already wear, and whether it will sit with your watch and rings.

The doll’s face is the most important part of the piece and the part that wears first. The nose tip and the chin, being raised, go bright before anything else, which is normal. Do not rub the face hard with a cloth; too much of that and the features flatten. Dust in the seams comes out with a soft dry brush, following the cut lines. When it is off, store it alone, not pressed face-first against something hard in a drawer.