White Copper Five Peaks Gourd Spinning Pendant

The gourd is not a casual shape in Daoism. It held elixir pills, it held wine, and the medicine gourd on a physician's back was the same object. Further back, in the Hou Hanshu, Fei Changfang saw Hu Gong hanging a gourd in the marketplace, followed him and leapt inside, and found terraces and pavilions layered within; the saying about long days inside the gourd comes from there. Folk custom gives the gourd another layer as well: the vine runs long and the seeds are many, and old dowries often included gourd-shaped vessels.

The Five Peaks are Mount Tai in the east, Mount Hua in the west, Mount Heng in the south, Mount Heng in the north and Mount Song at the centre. Daoism has a tradition of the True Form Charts of the Five Peaks, which draw each mountain's shape as a talisman-like diagram to be worn as a protective charm; old woodblock editions still survive. This piece gathers the five-peak chart and the two characters qian and kun into a gourd, and that is how the subject is put together. The old charts look like a tangle of bending lines, yet they mark mountain forms and water sources, part ancient map and part talisman.

It is called spinning because the middle layer turns. A revolving centre is nothing new in copper work; the difficulty is the tension. Too tight and it will not turn, which defeats the whole point; too loose and it rattles, which wears on you by the end of a day. A turned white copper bearing surface stays fairly steady, with a slight damping as it moves: it will not spin wildly at a touch and it will not seize. The structure dislikes falls, since a bent axle on a hard floor ends the smooth turning, so keep a hold of it when putting it on and taking it off.

The gourd shape itself suits hanging: small above, wide below, weight at the bottom, so it does not turn over as you wear it. The proportion of the two sections has to look right; too large an upper bulb reads as top-heavy, too small and it looks like a water drop. This one has a pronounced waist, the traditional gourd rather than the round cartoon sort, and it looks best against plain clothing. The hole at the mouth takes the cord and has to sit dead centre: off by a little and the pendant hangs crooked, which you will notice within a day.

There is nothing special about the care. What copper fears is sweat and sulphur. Wipe it with a soft cloth after wearing, do not shower in it, and keep it out of hot springs and pools, since a sulphur soak turns it black. Darkening in long storage is normal; if you want it bright, go over it with a brass cloth. Do not take sandpaper to it, because that rounds the edges of the relief and they never come back. Copper should not sit in a damp place for months on end; a small packet of desiccant in the drawer does more than any polish.