Nuwa · Five-Coloured Stones

01The story

The “Lie revealed” chapter of the Huainanzi records that Nuwa refined five-coloured stones to mend the azure sky and cut the legs of the giant turtle to set the four pillars. The five colours — blue, red, yellow, white and black — correspond to the five directions and the five virtues. The most interesting part of the tale is its action: repairing an incomplete world into a whole shape. The interface logic here comes from the same place — a large neutral cool white carries the sky, and the two saturated colours appear only in the few positions that need to be seen, with everything else left to the empty space around them.

02Where the colours come from

The main colour is azurite (copper carbonate hydroxide, Cu3(CO3)2(OH)2), matching the cool blue of painted decoration in the bronze era; the secondary accent is cinnabar red from the hematite family (Fe2O3). The other three of the five colours — yellow, white and black — are not promoted to accents; they are folded into the background, panel and text levels instead.

03How the palette was built

The ground is a cool grey-white, deliberately pulling away from the warmer themes in the myth collection. The panel uses a cooler green-grey, and body text is a deep ink with a cyan cast, so the whole set stays cool and the single high-chroma colour reads like the moment the mending stone is finally noticed.

04Sources and references

• ClassicHuainanzi (淮南子)Compiled by Liu An and others in the Western Han; “Lie revealed” chapterThe source of “Nuwa refined five-coloured stones to mend the azure sky”. The verbatim quotation is still to be checked against the Zhonghua Book Company punctuated edition.
• ClassicClassic of Mountains and Seas (山海经)Compiled over the Han period from mixed sourcesIts accounts of the mountains and deities around Kunlun help build the spatial imagery behind the five directional colours.
• ClassicChinese Mythology (中国神话)Yuan Ke, People’s Literature Publishing HouseA survey of the motifs and textual sources of the Nuwa myth.
• ClassicKaogong Ji (考工记)A chapter of the Zhouli, compiled between the Warring States and early HanAncient institutional records of the five colours, the six ritual jewels and painting practice, which corroborate the five-direction scheme.

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.