Baize · Album of Auspicious Beasts

01The story

Baize is an auspicious beast of legend. A fragment of the Xuanyuan Benji records that the Yellow Emperor met Baize while touring and mounted; Baize enumerated the words of the spirits and monsters. It never fights — its office is to remember the name of every thing in the world. From the Song dynasty onwards, the imperial painting studios recorded auspicious creatures in albums — Baize, Pixiu, Tianlu, Suanni — drawn with the finest brushwork and restrained colour on silk. This theme borrows that documentary character: dense with information, but with room left to breathe everywhere.

02Where the colours come from

The colours follow the usual layers of colour on silk: a plain silk ground, a panel tone of darkened old paper, the beast drawn in ink lines, and small accents of antique gold and cinnabar. Compared with the taotie theme the hues sit warmer and the chroma lower, and the accent moves to antique gold so that neither copper verdigris nor cinnabar is repeated.

03How the palette was built

This is a low-chroma theme: every neutral sits within a narrow band of lightness, so the layout is divided by hairlines rather than by blocks of colour. Antique gold is the primary accent, used only on link underlines, focus rings and small labels, so that it always reads as a highlight rather than the subject.

04Sources and references

• ClassicXuanyuan Benji (轩辕本纪)An ancient chronicle, long lost and surviving only in encyclopedic quotationsThe story of Baize naming the spirits comes from a reconstructed text; the original is lost, so any citation should name the edition used.
• ClassicTaiping Yulan (太平御览)Compiled by Li Fang and others, Song dynastyPreserves quotations from many lost works and is useful for checking fragments of the Xuanyuan Benji.
• ClassicChinese Mythology (中国神话)Yuan Ke, People’s Literature Publishing HouseA survey of how the imagery of auspicious beasts such as Baize changed over time.
• ClassicFive Thousand Years of Chinese Art (中国美术五千年)Edited by Yang QiMaterials and technique of Song court painting and colour on silk.
• PendingSong dynasty album of auspicious beasts (catalogue of objects)Pending: the specific museum album and its catalogue number have to be confirmed before this entry is replaced.

05Credits and licence

Palette

Theme Atlas editorial team

Text

Theme Atlas editorial team

Graphics

Theme Atlas (original SVG)

Data licence

Palette data released under CC BY 4.0

Illustration licence

All illustrations are original SVGs; no third-party imagery is used.