White Copper Five Jambhalas Gourd Pendant

One gourd, five ways to sell it, and the price difference sits in the chain and the box. The pendant alone is cheapest; with a chain or a cord saves the buyer the trouble; the floating box and the cloud-pattern box are for people giving it away. The counter is best laid out in that order — customers will work their way up on their own. Anyone who asks only about the box, saying the chain can come later, is almost certainly giving it as a gift, and the box had better be a firm one.

A gourd is small at the top, wide at the bottom, with a waist drawn in between. Cast as a pendant it has to be poured in two stages, because the waist is the thinnest point and the metal will not reach it in one pass. Judge a gourd by the waist first: a blowhole there shows immediately. White copper can pull a narrow waist, which is where it beats softer alloys. Narrow is not enough on its own; the curves either side have to match, and a waist set slightly off makes the whole gourd look wrong. That is the mould’s doing. A good mould leaves no seam at the waist, and a finger runs over it smooth.

The Five-Road Wealth Gods are Zhao Gongming at the centre plus the four directions, east, west, north and south. Five of them crowd onto the belly of the gourd at no bigger than a fingernail, identified by the folds of their robes and what they hold. Shrink a figure that far and the features blur; that is a limit of the work, not idleness in the workshop. If you can tell who is who, it has been done properly. With five figures packed together the folds have to stay separate — blur the lines and it becomes one lump of flesh and nobody is anybody.

The word for gourd sounds like fortune and salary, as everyone will tell you, and that is honestly why it sells. In folk use a gourd is also a vessel: for medicine, for wine, for keeping things. A vessel wants a narrow mouth and a wide belly — what goes in does not come out — and that reading fits the shape better than the pun does; it is worth a sentence when you explain the piece. Whether to add vine and leaves is a judgement each workshop makes: too much and it looks busy, none and the surface is bare. Watch how far the carver takes it.

Left alone, a white copper gourd darkens at the waist first. Brush dust out of the hollows with a soft brush, never pick at it with a needle, which leaves a mark every time. The floating box grips the pendant so it hangs in the middle and seems to hover when the lid comes off; the cloud box uses thick board stamped with cloud pattern and is decent to hand over. For a gift the box matters more than the chain — same pendant, different box, different weight in the hand. Put a card inside saying which of the five roads each figure looks after. The person receiving it can follow, and it shows the giver thought about it. The cloud box is thick board with a deep impression and a heft in the hand that a sealed plastic pack cannot match.