Blue Lotus Openwork Necklace

The field behind the flower is pierced into a fish-scale lattice, which is the Chinese shorthand for water. So the lotus is coming up out of something instead of sitting on a blank ground. That lattice is also what lets the chalcedony show through from behind, and it is why the disc reads as pale and lit rather than as a solid slab of gold.

The lotus comes up clean out of silted water. Not purity that was kept, but purity that had to be got through something.

The blue is not glass. Each petal carries fine striations running base to tip, with a soft sheen that shifts as the piece turns, and the colour graduates inside a single petal instead of sitting flat. That look belongs to diancui, the inlay work of Qing court jewellery, where blue was laid into gold cells and valued because it moved with the light in a way no flat pigment could manage. Every petal is worked separately, so no two pieces come out quite the same.

For anyone who wants colour at the throat and finds most Chinese jewellery too dark or too heavy.

It hangs on a box chain, the flat-linked kind, which tangles far less than a rope chain does. Deliberately short, so it sits at the collarbone and above a neckline, which means it works with a shirt or a dress and not under one.