Daoism and Chinese folk religion are intertwined in very ornate ways to the point it's hard to tease them apart. A case in point is the interaction with the calabash gourd and cinnabar.
The calabash gourd has many meanings in Chinese cultures. The oldest meanings are likely related to fertility and connubial bliss (because the many seeds within it suggested many children). Later it adopted the meaning also of fortune and wealth because of its similarity in sound to those terms. Finally it took on the meaning of health because doctors would transport their medicines inside of them.
And this is where the Daoist part enters the picture. Daoism, in its religious form, is obsessed with making "immortality pills" (recall that pills were frequently stored in the calabash), so calabashes became common symbols of Daoism.
The two things most commonly associated with these pills are quicksilver (mercury) and cinnabar (a mercury compound, but this wasn't known at the time; the colour of cinnabar was always a favoured colour in Chinese culture, up to today). Indeed one of the ways these pills were to be made was to put cinnabar in one part of a calabash and quicksilver in the other and have them "marry" (perpetuating the fertility symbolism).
Which leads us to the subjects of today's little photo-essay: a brass calabash-shaped charm with a surprising interior, and an actual calabash used as a charm ... with a surprising interior as well.
As usual the alt text has the explanations and Mastodon users will have to click through to the Pixelfed post to get all of them.
So why did I get these? I wanted to see if I can use them for those tiny dice I posted a while back¹. Unfortunately the hole in the real calabash was too small to fit all the dice, and the brass one was too tight a fit to be practical.
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