Brass Peace Totem Ring

The four characters for heaven, earth, peace and stillness are not a set phrase from scripture. No such text appears in the Daoist canon; it is a folk blessing assembled by hand, four characters put together to say something large and steady. Precisely because it is not scripture, carving it is free: the characters can be stretched, flattened, folded into pattern, without obeying any single stele style. None of the four is obscure, yet the layout is hard to arrange: heaven and earth are lean, peace and stillness are full, and set together they tend to ride high or low.

The word totem is used loosely here. Strictly, a totem is a mark of kinship between a clan and a species, and the anthropological definition is narrow. What jewellery calls a totem is usually characters or symbols repeated to make a rhythmical pattern. This ring takes that route: the four characters set at four points, their strokes extending to either side and joining cloud scrolls, so that the whole runs in a circle, pattern at a distance and characters up close. Whether the cloud joins flow depends on whether the turns have hard corners.

Brass is not the same as the usual white copper. Brass is copper with zinc, warm in colour and close to gold when new; white copper is copper with nickel, cool and near silver. Brass is a little harder and takes fine pattern without collapsing, but it contains zinc, and in damp conditions it raises a dark brown film, especially if sweat is left on it for a few days. That darkness is not a fault; the complexion of old brass depends on it. The warm tone of brass sets off densely stroked characters and looks weightier than a cool metal.

The face is wide and takes up a lot of room on the hand, so short fingers will feel weighed down. When choosing, err on the narrow side: anything wider than the length of the knuckle looks clumsy. One character at each of the four points reads upright on the face; turned to the palm side it is upside down, which is normal for a ring carved in the round and not worth minding. Closed band, so get the size right the first time; brass springs back little and resizing damages the pattern.

Brass oxidizes faster than white copper, the colour moving from gold to dark brown and on to green corrosion. To keep the warm tone, press the ring with a dry cloth after wearing and take the sweat off. Where corrosion has started, work copper polish on a soft cloth in circles; the corrosion lifts and the dark in the hollows stays. Do not soak it in salt water or vinegar: those remedies remove corrosion quickly and damage quickly too, pitting the surface. Do not wear it straight after polishing; let the surface dry first.