The Nine-Colored Deer: The Story Behind the Design
Some of the deer you see on Myth & Clay cups come from a story that has been painted for more than a thousand years.
The Nine-Colored Deer appears in the murals of Mogao Cave 257 in Dunhuang. The cave dates to the Northern Wei period, and the mural is known as the Deer King Jataka. It is one of the best-known story paintings at the Mogao Caves.
The Story
A man falls into a river and is close to drowning. A beautiful deer with nine colors enters the water and saves him.
The deer asks for only one thing in return: do not tell anyone where it lives.
The man promises.
Later, the queen dreams of the extraordinary deer and wants its skin. The king offers a reward to anyone who can find it. The man who was saved hears about the reward and breaks his promise, leading the king and his men to the deer.
When they arrive, the deer does not run away. Instead, it tells the king what happened: how it saved the man, and how that same man betrayed it for a reward.
The king is moved by the story. He spares the deer and orders that it be protected. In the mural's story, the man who betrayed the deer ultimately suffers the consequences of breaking his promise.
It is a simple story, which is probably why it has lasted so long: kindness, greed, gratitude and betrayal are still easy to understand a thousand years later.
A Story Painted Across a Wall
Deer King Jataka, Mogao Cave 257, Dunhuang. Image: Dunhuang Research Academy / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
What makes the Cave 257 mural especially interesting is the way the story is told visually.
It is painted as a long sequence of scenes across the wall, almost like an early comic strip. The story begins from both sides and moves toward the center, where the confrontation between the deer and the king takes place. The Dunhuang Academy describes this horizontal narrative arrangement as one of the distinctive features of the mural.
The deer itself is calm and elegant rather than aggressive. Even when surrounded by the king's men, it stands its ground.
That image is one of the reasons the Nine-Colored Deer became such a recognizable part of Dunhuang art.
The story later reached an even wider audience through the 1981 animated film The Nine-Colored Deer, produced by Shanghai Animation Film Studio and inspired by the Dunhuang mural.
Why We Keep Painting It
At Myth & Clay, we do not try to copy the mural exactly.
We take the deer, the clouds, the moon, flowing lines and other details, then redraw them for the shape of each ceramic piece.
Some versions stay close to the calm feeling of the original story. Others place the deer under a moon, among clouds, flowers or more abstract landscapes.
The same subject can appear again, but the finished cups never look exactly the same. Brushwork changes. Mineral colors change in the kiln. Gold or silver details change how the surface catches light.
That is part of why we keep returning to the Nine-Colored Deer. It is an old image, but it gives us a lot of room to make something new.
From Dunhuang to a Cup
The original story survives on the wall of a cave in Dunhuang.
Our version is much smaller.
It is something you can hold, drink from and use every day.
For us, that is the interesting part: taking an image that has survived for centuries and letting it live somewhere completely different — on a ceramic cup in someone's home.