When you enjoy writing but also get easily distracted. Inspirations, snippets, art and quotes. If you like my writing, consider buying me some tea. My WIPs. (tags by WIP) #quote image <- tag for quote images
List under cut so it's not too long as a pinned post
Dragons and Kingdoms: No official title yet. A boy with anxiety encounters a dragon in the forest, and after they both panic, they start to realize that maybe neither is as problematic as they once thought. However, a traveling entertainer throws their tenuous balance into chaos. Classic fantasy with limited magic, the first draft is mostly done but it needs a complete rewrite. Inspiration also drawn from Irish mythology. Mental health/illness, generational politics and drama, fake dating, sibling rivalry, and more. #dragons and kingdoms
Dancing with Deception: A dancer dropout from Morocco meets a mafia’s chef in Lyon, France. Romance, frustrations, and kidnapping ensue. Cowriting with one other author, the rough draft is up on fictionpress and the next step is heavy editing. POC mains, queer, ED, mental health discussions, extended family politics, and such things. #dancing with deception #dwd
Frozen Sands: Nashida, a young woman from the sands of the south, meets Halim, a clumsy young man with a knack for trouble, in the ice up north just in time for the Festival of Lights. However, Halim's family found problems with a pirate in the past, and he's about to cause some real trouble. Plus, Nashida is starting to find some unsettling clues about the origins of the lifelike statues in the area... POC main characters, both bi, one trans with bipolar disorder and ADHD, the other with relationship trauma and anxiety. Writing with 1 cowriter. #Frozen Sands
Birds of a Feather: Labyrinth/Princess Tutu crossover. Sarah finally lands a job as a theater teacher. Fakir has finally graduated with Duck waddling beside him. Rue and Mytho are finally going to get married. And Jareth has found an excellent opportunity to stick his nose into everything and make a glittery mess. Uzura wants to help. The Oak Tree is amused. #Birds of a Feather
Does the Duck Receive a Happy Ending? Princess Tutu reverse isekai xianxia. Long ago a crown prince shattered his golden core to stay a demonic raven. Now the ancient world of stories is cropping up in a small rural Chinese town. Can a simple duck return order to the world, or will things only become more unbalanced? #ptutu xianxia
A cowriter and I have a sideblog with several more WIPs listed at @foxfireink (including some that used to be listed here)! Here
Blurb:
A new fairy tale where friendship is the truest love of all.
Prince Nicolas rules the winter of the Northern Realm with a frosty attitude that chills all who look upon him, until the day a warm human woman enters his life unannounced. Lost and without memories to find her way home, Ann finds herself sharing the ice palace with the prickly prince. However, her visit has a time limit written into faerie law, and a deadly consequence should Nicolas allow her to stay beyond it.
All Ann wanted was to find her way home; all Nicolas wanted was to be left alone. Though circumstance brings them together, a shared longing to be seen and understood soon ties them to each other, and it is that bond which will decide their fates.
Got any advice on making a currency system. Especially a system that isn't just based on rare metals or algorithms?
LilyS's playlist has a bunch of nice inspirations and is the vibe I'm going for. But I want to hear from you as well.
Wow! I've never seen this channel before, but having now watched her videos she is very well spoken and super creative. Personally if I were to give advice now I would probably suggest someone watch her currency series lol. She does a very good job explaining her decisions and creative process, as well as what a worldbuilder should typically consider when desinging currency
I'd say I learned more about worldbuilding from this ask than what I can provide, but I can still try to give some input
My Currency Worldbuilding Thoughts
Convenience & Utility
Obviously the most important part of making a currency is its job as currency; which means it needs to be convenient.
One thing I really liked in LilyS' videos were how she sometimes incorporated the containers for the currency she designed, it really made me think of the rosaries in Silksong, since they're stringed together, and serve a religious purpose outside their job as a currency. And I think that's an underrated piece of designing something as simple as currency, especially when to make it most convenient it needs to be easy to carry.
The money not only needs to be convenient to carry, but also to count, and of course make.
This can also go for accessibility, often to why coins have specific engravings, and dollar notes in many other nations have braille or different sized bills (except the United States because screw blind people I guess)
Design
There is of course nothing wrong going with the simple coin or bill. They're popular in both reality and worldbuilding for a reason. They're simple, efficient, and easy to travel with. They're timeless too, being easy to make from ancient times to modern days.
Even considering coins and bills, there needs to be ways to differentiate the different amounts, and the numbers need to be easy to count and utilize for trade and commerce.
I really liked some of LilyS' examples of this, using different flowers for some of her plant-inspired currencies.
Some examples I can think of in my own worldbuilding that I should totally post would be the new Charagonian slips are marked with hexagons to give them the appearance of honeycomb, the more comb, the larger amount. Their brailen (coins) are marked with flowers on the tails side, and bugs on the heads side.
The Euphoritians live in an entirely music-centered. Their bills are actually short piano rolls, each represented by a different historical composer that is imprinted on the rolls. When counting someone's bill at a store, the roll is pressed through their cash register which plays the complete tune of their bill.
The bills also have different colors and decorative appearance to help them be differentiated in a quick exchange.
Piano roll for example, a thin sheet of paper with cut notches in the paper that is read by a mechanical instrument that reads and plays note based on the paper, think like a music box.
Novelty & Other Uses
Not at all required, but fun either way, is deciding if the currency has any novelty.
Many banknotes around the world have incredibly detailed designs, not just to represent their history or culture, but also to prevent counterfeiting, since as the more complicated the design, the more difficult it is to replicate.
USD have windows, where if you hold it up to the light you may see some shadow images, these act as both a watermark and an easter egg. While the novelty in real life isn't as cool as it could be fantasy, that where we get to have fun.
Money doesn't always have to stay money either. Maybe what is being used as currency didn't used to be currency, and now it is.
One of my favorite examples of this are the pearls in Rain World. In all reality the pearls are meant to be read from by these higher biomechanical beings known as Iterators, but while traveling throughout Rain World, you'll come across the Scavs, a social tribal creature that adores their shiny colors and collects them for both decoration and trade.
In my obsessive favorite video game series, The Metro games, bullets are currency, but they're also still bullets. Which says so much about the Metro post-apocalypse worldbuilding, with having to explain much of anything.
And of course we have the bottle caps from Fallout...
Culture
Nowadays referred to as shell money, historically many coastal and island nations relied on forms of sea shells as their currency, but why?
Well for lot of the same reason many places used to gems, metals, and minerals. Shells were valuable in ornamentation and jewelry. This made them good commodities for trade, and any good commodity for trade would also make a great currency. The most popular shell of shell money ended up being the cowrie.
Image of cowrie shells.
Culture affects our money, and money affects our culture. I honestly don't really have much to say here, but think about the culture you're building for.
Creation & Counterfeit
Another important thing to consider when designing a currency is of course the material it is made out of. Whether it be shell, stone, pearls, paper, gems, mana, or more.
If it's a common found material than there needs to be something about the currency that helps prevent counterfeiting. Whether it be a specialized enchant, an ornate design, or hologram imprinted onto the currency; no matter the age and day of the society you're worldbuilding for, counterfeiting will be a problem.
Storage & Commerce & Conflict
Ahhhh banks, vaults, and wealthy fat cats. Where there is money there is greed. Yeah we don't always have to add some currency-based conflict, in fact for most of my nations I've worldbuilt I haven't leaned too heavily on the woes of classism and wealth hoarding, but sometimes you need a debt collector or two to spice things up.
Aside from deciding where the wealth moves, and what are the major imports and exports of certain regions/cities, I like to come up with any potential banking systems.
There's several main systems of banking, and throughout history we've seen banking take many forms. Since the times of Ancient Sumer, humans have played their hands in banking, but we didn't see much like the modern day forms of banking until the 14th century.
Some things to think about when designing banks
Bookkeeping
Structure, Religious Relationship, Architecture
What money is held in?
How large swathes of money is transported
Religious restrictions
Loans
Debt Collection
Final Thoughts
Uhhhh people should worldbuild more currencies, this is fun
Researchers found that roundhead parrotfish can spend up to an hour making this cocoon before sleep. In one study, fish with intact cocoons had far fewer parasite bites than fish whose cocoons were removed. Scientists think the cocoon may block parasites physically, chemically, or by hiding the fish’s smell.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Evolution of the Mamianqun: Fabrics Design (Part 1)
Nav: Presentation // Intro // Southern Song 南宋 // Yuan 蒙元 // Early Ming 明初 // Mid-Early Ming 明中前 // Mid-Late Ming 明中後 // Late Ming 晚明 // Fabrics Pt 1 // Fabrics Pt 2 // Set Easter Eggs // Conclusion
Patting myself on the back for finally finishing the six main design posts, but still got two more to go!!! This is the fabric design post, arguably the most symbolic part of these six sets with the most juicy lore behind it, so if your thing is Chinese cosmology and symbolism this'll be your jam.
This section is very long (what a surprise), so I'll be dividing it into two posts.
Part one, which is this post, will talk about the mythology and folktale inspiration behind the design elements, and introduce the different parts of the skirt design. I will do a deep dive into the main part of the design with the longma dragon-horse that appears on the latter three time period's skirt designs.
Part two will expand on the rest of the skirt sections, which are smaller and less detailed. I'll also talk a bit about the variation of the skirt designs through the different time periods, and the technical parts of mamianqun fabric manufacturing that I had to go through to make these fabrics happen.
～The Lore～
The Chinese name for the Metamorphosis set is 龍馬負圖 / long2 ma3 fu4 tu2 / "Dragon-Horse Bearing the Diagram." This is a reference to the story of the 河圖洛書 / he2 tu2 luo4 shu1 / "River Diagram and Luo Book," more commonly known as the Yellow River Map and Luo River Square. These are two visual diagrams that appear in very very early Chinese legends and mythology about the beginning of Dynastic China. They look like this:
Src: 河圖洛書, 2017
I will explain more on what exactly these represent later, but for now, just know that they appear in a number of legends recounted by very famous early writings such as thing 易經 / yi4 jing1 / "I'Ching" text, most of which share similar elements. The one that stuck out to me most was the legend of 大禹治水 / da4 yu2 zhi4 shui3 / "Yu the Great Tames the Waters," which can be considered somewhat of a secondary creation myth.
There's no evidence of this guy's existence, but the story goes that pre-dynastic China often suffered from devastating floods from the Yellow River, which kept them from advancing very far. The worst of these was the Great Flood, a massive flood that extended over at least two generations. The emperor at the time, Yao, had been trying to solve this problem for a long time, but the first person who tried, 鯀 / Gun—Yu the Great's father, also called 白馬 / bai2 ma3 / White Horse—failed to control the waters, so the task was passed down to his son.
L: Standing Portrait of King Yu of Xia, National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 中畫000257N000000000 // R: Yellow River, whose watershed covers most of northern China and drains to the Yellow Sea, Wikimedia Commons
It's said that Yu dedicated most of his life to solving this problem. A number of stories related to this process have been told, one of which being the legend of the Yellow River Map and Luo River Square. Seeing that Yu was going in the wrong direction, the gods sent a great dragon-horse and a giant tortoise as messengers to the earth, who emerged from the waters bearing these diagrams on their backs, revealing clues about divination and geomancy to Yu the Great.
After consulting the diagrams, he realized that he had been mistaken and changed direction, ultimately succeeding in his goal after many years. Some other variations have different animals or people revealing the diagrams to different people, but for the year of the horse I focused on the version that has the dragon-horse bearing the Yellow River Map on its coat.
Eventually Yu tamed the waters through a complex irrigation system and opening an artificial channel out to sea, which made him so popular with the people that the emperor declared him his heir. He allegedly took the throne in his 50s, establishing the Xia Dynasty, the very first dynasty in Chinese historiography.
From a broader level, deluge myths are extremely common in early history across the world (although the nuwa story matches them more closely than this one tbh). I feel like almost everyone has their own version of a massive flood that ended up leading to some sort of new beginning.
I think this legend takes place in a grey area between myth and history, too far back to have much evidence of existence, but recent enough to be relatively acceptable when considered a dramatized version of events. At any rate it's an extremely significant part of Chinese folklore, and while the dragon-horse only plays a small part in it, I latched onto this as the primary inspiration for this set.
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～The Fabric Design～
Since most of the mamianqun fabrics are just variations of the same central design, I’ll use the most complex one as the visual example since it already contains all of the elements found in the other skirt designs. That would be the mid-early Ming mamianqun. At the end of this section I will talk briefly about how this design was modified for the other time periods' skirts.
We can first separate this into a few distinct repeating horizontal pattern sections. If we regard the pattern covering a majority of the area as the ‘base’ pattern (B), there are four distinct pattern sections (1,2,3,4), plus a divider pattern (D) that appears multiple times between them.
(1): Hem Block 底襴
The lowest pattern block near the hem of the skirt is also the widest and the one that appears in both of the other colored mamianqun designs (mid-late and late Ming). Some of the elements were moved around a bit to compress the block proportions for the other designs, but most of them remain the same. I regard this as the “main” design block, as most of the storytelling elements are concentrated here.
The primary scene depicted is a longma dragon-horse galloping through the waves, but every design element included has a meaning to it.
The Longma
First the creature itself. This is a somewhat modern interpretation of a dragon-horse, with some modern aesthetics prioritized. The legs, hooves, body shape, and tail are all very horse-like, with some added dragon features like the flaming mane, belly scales, straight-back horns, whiskers, and wrinkled nose. The spiral patterns on the horse’s chest and flank as well as the fire wheels coming off of the hind leg joints were also elements taken from usual depictions of eastern dragons, who often have similar flaming wheels on their ankles.
There are a couple different ways this creature can be interpreted. One is as the longma dragon-horse from the legend of this set’s namesake, as one of the two creatures that surfaced from the Yellow River as witnessed by Yu the Great, as described before. The Classic of the Mountains and Seas describe longma as being able to walk on water without sinking and as a sign of a divine ruler.
Src: 图：武官常服补子纹样, 明代群臣之服：常服 // Sea-Horse ninth rank is the lower right square (武九品）
Another is as the 海馬 / hai3 ma3 / "Sea-Horse" (not the fish), a dragon-like horse which is depicted on the ninth-rank martial officer rank badge in the Ming Dynasty official uniform system, used specifically to contrast against the five-clawed imperial dragon buzi badge on the mid-late Ming set’s round-collar robe, as a representation of the wild disarray and constant flouting of fashion rules during that time period.
Src: JourneytotheWest.jpg, Tang Sanzang riding on the White Dragon Horse, Wikimedia Commons
Last is as the 白龍馬 / bai2 long2 ma3 / white dragon-horse (that's literally his name) from the famous Ming Dynasty novel 西遊記 / xi1 you2 ji4 / "Journey to the West" (you may also know it as the Monkey King), a dragon prince originally living in a river who shapeshifts into the party’s steed (after accidentally eating their horse, as you do). You’ll notice that even though they have slightly different names and contexts, all of these depictions are actually quite consistent with each other: there’s always some sort of very powerful horse-dragon mix that has something to do with a body of water.
The Waves
The top and bottom of this block are lined with a wave pattern, crested with white foam. Waves are often depicted in a very circular, spiraling manner, adding a sort of rolling motion to them. This is helped by the repeated parallel lines giving them dimension, plus the white seafoam that helps partition some of the different wave sections from each other.
Src: 武官九品海馬補子, National Digital Archive Program, Taiwan (Qing Dynasty)
The original haima sea-horse buzi depicts a horse galloping over repeated waves, so I kept that framing in the composition of this piece, though the waves are more organic and less repetitive. They also come down from the top, which is more of an aesthetic decision than a symbolic one, but I did notice that the waves look remarkably similar to clouds if you color them white, which makes sense given the Chinese term 雲海 / yun2 hai3 / “sea of clouds,” which refers to the view you often get on Asian mountaintops where the clouds are so dense and thick that they look like a white ocean sprawling out in front of you. You could say that, with the celestial nature of dragons, this horse could be either galloping over the water or treading over the clouds—you just don’t know!
河圖洛書
Next I want to go over these two repeated symbols, the former of which you’ll see in the base pattern as well. These are a continuation of the 河圖洛書 story: they’re visual representations of the 河圖 and the 洛書.
The traditional depictions of these two ‘maps’ look like this. They’re arrangements of black and white dots in kind of a square array. It’s somewhat debated what they actually represent, and their exact functional role in the legends is vague, but they’re generally considered divination or cosmology maps that have to do with the bagua eight trigrams, the five elements, and five cardinal Chinese directions.
洛書 / The Luoshu Square
Src: Luo Square, Wikipedia (various imaged pieced together by me to fool tumblr's image limit)
Upon a closer look we can see that the Luoshu has nine objects arranged in a 3x3 matrix. Each object is made up of a different number of dots: the ones with an even number of dots are black, and the ones with an odd number of dots are white. If we convert the numbers of dots into numbers, we will get a matrix that looks like this: (4, 9, 2; 3, 5, 7; 8, 1, 6).
An extremely important observation is that this arrangement constitutes what we call a third order normal magic square: if you add up the three numbers in any row, column, or diagonal of the array, you will get the same number (try it yourself—what’s the magic sum?) You might also notice that each of the integers 1 through 9 are used once—this is what we call a normal magic square.
I’d previously only encountered magic squares when playing with AMC problems in middle school, so it was really interesting to see it pop up here. Remarkably, the luoshu is the smallest possible normal magic square (reflections and rotations of the same square are not considered distinct, and squares with repeated number entries don’t count). Every possible 3x3 normal magic square is a transformation of this one.
If you look closely at each shape you will recognize that each one has a number of “lobes” or “sections.” The even-numbered shapes are filled in with red, and the odd-numbered shapes are teal and have negatives corresponding to their number. For example, the shape on the left has three spokes, and the one in the middle contains five compartments. Each of them exhibit some sort of repetition, imagery, or sectioning that has to do with their number, and they’re arranged in the same way as the Luo square, so that any row, column, or diagonal will add up to 15.
河圖 / The Yellow River Map
Src: 河圖與洛書
The Yellow River Map is a little more confusing in what exactly it is—there doesn’t seem to be an agreed-upon mathematical relationship like in its counterpart, and it’s a bit more complex. Some think that the version that we have now may not be the same as the original, and that if we had the original then the relationship would be equally obvious. It does have some established linkages to ideas in Chinese cosmology, but they won’t make much sense unless you’ve got somewhat of a background in that (which is not me).
As in the Luoshu, some of the dots (even arrangements) are filled in and some (odd arrangements) are blank. The integers 1-10 also appear once each, with 10 uniquely wrapping all the way around the central 5.
Culturally, this was the primary map that helped Yu the Great construct his irrigation and drainage system. While the myths vary in the form and identity of the person, deity, or spirit that actually gave him the map, it's generally hinted at that this was some sort of directional mapping of the surrounding land and topology, which helped Yu figure out how to build channels through what he later established as the Nine Provinces.
The visual symbol I came up with for this one is a little less abstract, preserving the dots on the outside and most of the structure, although I neglected to include the lines. The 3 and 4 I turned into a fan shape instead of just dots, and the outer four numbers were arranged in a curved shape to make the footprint of the whole symbol a bit more interesting. The top and bottom halves of the 10 are disconnected but represented by 5 teardrop shapes above and 5 below, as some other depictions have the dots split up in this way but connected by lines.
The Silk Moths
If you thought these were butterflies, you thought wrong—these are silk moths! Specifically bombyx mori, the domesticated silk moth.
Why include them? While it's not super common anymore, silkworms did have a connection to horses in older Chinese folklore, apparently stemming from the fact that the silkworm's head is shaped similarly to a horse's head. The more popular origin story of sericulture stems from Leizu, the Empress of the Yellow Emperor, who discovered silk after a cocoon fell into her hot tea and invented the art of sericulture and weaving.
Src: Silkworms, Invertebrate Welfare
An alternative is the story of 馬頭娘 / ma3 tou2 niang2 / "Horse-Headed Maiden," a girl who promised to marry her family's white horse if he brought her father home from war/kidnapping/going to the store for milk, which he did. Her father, not wanting a horse for a son-in-law, killed the horse, but when he hung its hide up to dry, it flew up, wrapped around the girl, and carried her away into a mulberry tree, where she was transformed into a silk-spitting, horse-headed silkworm. She then eventually ascended to the heavens and was worshipped as the goddess of silkworms. Records of this story appear in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Taiping Guangji, the Rites of Zhou, etc.
Beyond that story I'm sure I don't have to elaborate on the whole silk-clothes-hanfu thing :p
L: Domestic silkmoth, Bombyx Mori, Photo 369978040, (c) GD, all rights reserved, uploaded by GD, iNaturalist, April 2024 // R: Wild silkmoth, Photo 517391659, no rights reserved, iNaturalist, June 2025
In terms of design elements, domestic silk moths (bombyx mori) are leucistic, in comparison to wild silk moths (bombyx mandarina), which are brown. I tried to mimic the textured veins of the wings of the silkmoth in my design, as well as the fuzzy antennae, the thicker thorax, and the resting angle/general silhouette of the wings. Overall, I'm not sure how recognizable they are as silk moths, but I like that I was able to include this bit of detail.
Bird / Bat
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a... bat?
Regardless of what it is, it's flying! I kept this shape ambiguous on purpose. Gulls flying over the sea are one option, given the ocean setting—the pointed tail and head would lend themselves to the shape of a beak and narrower tail feathers.
However, another possibility is bats. While they may seem like an odd choice, bats are also good-luck systems often depicted on woven fabrics and embroidery in Chinese clothing in varying levels of simplification.
Src: 乾隆青花粉彩桃蝠纹双耳抱月瓶, 满清文物中的传统吉祥纹样——蝠纹, Prince Kung's Palace Museum
Bats are considered lucky because of their name in Chinese, 蝙蝠 / bian1 fu2, or just 蝠 / fu2 in its bound form, which is pronounced the same as the character for good luck, 福 / fu2. They're incorporated into ceramics, textiles, carvings, paintings etc. in various levels of simplification and abstraction. I find that the most common indicator of a bat being depicted is the forward angled point of the wrist joint on its wing, which is sometimes pointed and sometimes just curved. My design does have a forward curve, but it's not very exaggerated, so it's sort of up to the viewer.
壽字 / The "Shou" Character
Above the longma there's a red circle representing the sun (Chinese depictions of the sun are usually more red than yellow) and the Oracle Bone Script (really old) version of the character 壽 / shou4. Shou is a word that means everlasting, long-lived, etc. It's technically a combination of a phono-semantic character (形聲字 / xing2 sheng1 zi4, aka one part of the character represents its sound, and another part represents its meaning) and a compound ideogram (multiple pictograms combined to create a scene related to the meaning).
Src: 寿字的源字形, 雲美名網
We can divide the character into two pieces: the top part, which is the character 老 / lao3 / "old," and the bottom part, which is an archaic form of the character 疇 / chou2 / "field." The 老 character represents the meaning, and it is a pictogram of an old person with a hunched back. In this ideogram, the person is leaning over the 疇 character like a cane. 疇 in this case functions as a phonetic indicator of the pronunciation of the whole character, shou, which is similar to chou. Later on the 壽 character became more common and culturally significant than 疇, so 疇 was retroactively changed into its own self-referential phonogram: 田 / tian2 / "crops" to denote its meaning and 壽 to denote its sound.
Culturally, the 壽 character is one of the most common good-luck character motifs used in Chinese designs, just like the 福 / fu2 / "luck" character (Chinese people just really wanna get rich, live a long time, and have good luck). The character is often stylized into three types of patterns: 長壽紋 / chang2 shou4 wen2 / "long shou pattern," 花壽紋 / hua1 shou4 wen2 / "flower shou pattern, "and 團壽紋 / tuan2 shou4 wen2 / "round shou pattern." They often appear on embroidery and fabric patterns throughout history as well.
L: 明 缂丝“十二章纹”皇帝衮服（复原件） 十三陵特区办事处藏, 理解自己的文明（16）：华服锦绣（下）｜图鉴, October 2024 // R: 壽字紋, 燎泽文创｜中国传统纹样之寿字纹, November 2025
The other thing is that 壽 is a homophone for the character 獸 / shou4 / "beast." In the Ming Dynasty nine-rank badge system, there are two categories of officials—civil and martial—with nine ranks each. Each rank/category combination was represented by an animal depicted on a badge they wore on their uniforms. The animals depicted for the civil ranks were all heavenly animals, like birds. The animals for the martial ranks, however, were earthly animals, or 獸. The dragon-like 海馬 haima sea-horse, representing the ninth rank martial official, is one of those—tying it all back together.
Okay I'm tired now, saving the rest for the next post!!! Hopefully won't put it off for like three months again x-x
Okay we're almost done! Just a fabric design post + concluding comments left! Also sorry for lack of pics in the first half making it really dense lol, the 30 image limit is lowkey killing me
i know everyone loves baby seals, but sometimes i really am blown away by their whimsy. they took a teddy bear and made it a mermaid. i feel very wonderful knowing we live on the same planet as puppy mermaid teddies
Porcupine-Fish Helmet from Kiribati, c.1800-1880 CE: this helmet was crafted from the carcass of a porcupine-fish
This helmet was made using the skin of a porcupine-fish that was killed and then carefully dried. The front edge is lined with vegetable fiber and human hair, and it's equipped with coconut-fiber ties that were used to fasten the helmet onto the wearer's head.
Above: another porcupine-fish helmet from Kiribati
Helmets with this design are also known as te barantauti, and they were created as part of a traditional costume that was worn by the warriors of Kiribati (an island nation located in the South Pacific). Most of the surviving examples date back to the mid-1800s.
Above: a porcupine-fish helmet displayed with a high-backed cuirass, wrist-guard, and spear, c.1800s CE
Te barantauti were typically worn with body armor that was crafted from coconut-fiber and stingray skin, along with braided wrist-guards covered in shark's teeth, high-backed cuirasses, and wooden swords, spears, and daggers studded with stingray spines and shark's teeth.
Above: wrist-guards and cuirasses from Kiribati, c.1800-1880 CE
In some cases, the warrior's helmet was crafted from coconut-fiber instead. The same material was also used to construct sleeves, belts, and "overalls" that effectively covered the rest of the body.
Above: a coconut-fiber helmet with a full set of armor
The porcupine-fish helmets provided very little protection -- they were primarily created and used as a way to intimidate enemies during ritual combat.
As this article explains:
The men of Kiribati were famed for their fierceness, and when it came time for battle, they dressed the part, in head-to-toe armor made from coconut fiber and stingray skin. Their weapons were wooden swords lined with sharks’ teeth.
The crown jewel of Kiribati armor, though, was a spiky helmet made from the porcupinefish. A member of the blowfish family, a porcupinefish looks like an adorable big-eyed cartoon character—until it’s threatened. Then, it sucks water into a cavity between its body and skin and inflates to several times its normal size, stiffening the spines that usually lie flat.
Porcupinefish helmets, known as te barantauti, were made by capturing one of these agitated, puffed-up porcupinefish, killing it, peeling the skin away from the body, and drying it. The spiny skin that remained was reinforced with coconut-fiber padding and fashioned into a brittle helmet.
Though the helmets offered little in the way of actual protection, they instantly made their wearers appear bigger, taller, and more formidable.
For Kiribati warriors, this intimidation was more important than protection from death. That’s because in traditional Kiribati culture, a person who took someone’s life—even in a fair fight—paid with their most prized resource: their land. So instead of going for the kill, warriors sought to wound and humiliate their enemy. Fish-skin and coconut-fiber offered just the right amount of protection.
Above: a shark-tooth spear from Kiribati, c.1800s CE
Unfortunately, most of the surviving helmets, weapons, and pieces of armor are now housed in Western museums:
Over the years, dozens of these helmets made their way into museums across the globe, while few remain in Kiribati. The Smithsonian actually has three, the British Museum five, and Sweden’s Världskulturmuseerna “at least eight,” according to their digitization curator Magnus Johansson. One te barantauti even wound up at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, in the tiny town of St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
Over the last four decades, since Kiribati gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1979, the armor has taken on a new meaning—as a potent symbol of local culture. It features on tourist trinkets, but also stamps and school mascots. “The armor is not just a garment to me,” says Rareti Ataniberu, an I-Kiribati craftswoman. “It is a piece of art, a craft.”
Above: an armored warrior from Kiribati, mid-1800s
Sources & More Info:
Hakai Magazine: Kiribati’s Porcupine-Fish Helmets were More about Drama than Defense
Atlas Obscura: The Mystery of the Puffer-Fish Helmets of Kiribati
Pacific Presences: Fighting Fibres: Kiribati Armour and Museum Collections
Time Magazine: Why Indigenous Artifacts Should be Returned to Indigenous Communities
The Museum of New Zealand: Te tauti from Kiribati
The Museum of New Zealand: Rere (Knife or Short Sword) from Kiribati
