White Copper Antique Laoshan Wang Lingguan Pendant

There is more than one Laojun Mountain. The best known stands in Luanchuan, in Luoyang, where the temple group on the Golden Peak is built against the cliff; in winter the snow covers the steps and the photographs travel a long way. Legend has it that Laozi retired in these parts, and the mountain takes its name from that. Legend is legend and the mountain is the mountain, two different things, and most of the people who go up do not press the question. Other provinces have small hills of the same name, and the story they carry is not always the same one. The rock at Luanchuan is granite, the cliff faces run sheer, and the temples are built flush against them.

Wang Lingguan is the guardian of a Daoist temple. Coming in through the gate, the figure standing in the first hall is usually his: three eyes, red face, a golden whip in one hand and a mudra in the other, feet on wind-and-fire wheels. His office is to hold the gate and to watch good and evil, and his place is outside the door, not in the main hall. The rule for his image is standing, never seated; seated, he is no longer a guardian. His own name was Wang Shan, a man of Emperor Huizong’s reign in the Song, and the tradition that he studied under Sa Shoujian is the one most often told. The third eye is the guardian’s mark, set vertically and narrower than the other two.

The pendant puts mountain and guardian on one face: the ridge line across the upper half, the standing figure below, the figure short and taking only a third. The antiquing darkens the edges of the ridge first, as though the light were behind it. The back is engraved with the three characters of the mountain’s name, shallow. The ridge is cut hard, like knife work, taken from the cliff at the Golden Peak. Only the outline is cut, with no trees or rocks, and the blank space is what lets it separate from the figure underneath.

Four versions differ in two things: chain or none, yellow or white. The necklace version comes with a fine matched chain and the clasp at the back; the pendant alone has its hole at the top, ready for a cord. Yellow once antiqued looks like old bronze, white runs colder and keeps the ridge edges crisp. The chain falls just below the collarbone, which sits right with a round neckline. On white copper the yellow version runs dark and reddens with wear, while the white goes toward gray.

The plaque is rectangular with rounded corners, so it lies against the chest without digging in. Copper has weight; it slaps the chest when you run and stays still when you walk. Do not take a silver cloth to the aged black. Rub it off and new copper shows through in patches, which is worse to look at than a piece left bright all over. The guardian’s face is small, the features no more than a few cuts: from a distance a patch of red, close up the three eyes come out. The characters on the back are incised so faintly you can barely feel them. The front is the side meant to be seen.