The five elements

The five elements, wuxing 五行, are an old Chinese way of describing how things change and how they relate. Wood, fire, earth, metal, water. Not five substances the world is made of. Five groupings, and a way of talking about one thing turning into another. The oldest systematic list of them sits in the "Hong Fan" chapter of the Book of Documents.

We use them as a colour system. That's all. Five names, five colours.

木 means tree, or wood. Before paper, Chinese writing was done on narrow strips of bamboo and wood, bound with cord into a kind of folding book. They stayed the standard writing material until paper slowly took over, in the early centuries AD.

火 means fire. Cinnabar is a red mineral, mercury sulfide. Ground down, it makes the pigment vermilion, the red of Chinese lacquerware and of the paste used to stamp a seal onto a painting or a letter. Our Cinnabar is only the name of the colour. There's no cinnabar in the print.

土 means earth, or soil. Loess is windblown silt, fine as dust and ochre in colour. It covers north-central China, tens of metres deep in places. It's what the Yellow River carries, and why the river is called yellow. Soft enough to carve a house into.

金 means metal. Bronzes from the Shang and Zhou dynasties carry inscriptions that were cast rather than scratched on afterwards: cut into the clay mould first, then fixed when the metal was poured. They're called jinwen, 金文, metal writing, and in English usually bronze inscriptions.

水 means water. Chinese ink started as pine wood, burned slowly so the soot could be collected, then mixed with animal glue and pressed into a solid stick. The stick does nothing dry. You rub it on a stone with water until it runs black.

Every mug and tote we make has its design printed in one of these five colours. Colour can vary a little from print to print, so take these as the colour we're aiming for, not an exact match.