A reference library of Chinese historical ornament, built around one question most pattern packs never answer: where is this from?
Every pattern here is drawn by the app from a rule recorded in a historical source — a plate in a Song or Ming treatise, or an object in a museum collection. Open any pattern and the source is right under it: the book, the volume, the plate title, the scan page. Nothing is traced from a modern pattern book, and nothing is AI-generated.
WHAT YOU GET
• A growing library of geometric patterns, each with its provenance written out
• Adjustable density, stroke weight and scale — the pattern is generated, not a fixed image
• Colour systems taken from what the treatises actually specify, with the distinction kept honest: the SYSTEM is documented, the exact colour values are ours
• All-over repeats and border repeats, filterable
• Export a full sheet or the single repeating tile as SVG
• On iPad, press and hold to drag a pattern straight into Procreate, Affinity and the like
FOR WORK YOU HAVE TO EXPLAIN
Collect candidates into a project set, then export the set as one comparison sheet plus a plain-text citation list — ready to paste into a credits page, a proposal or an exhibition label. That list is the reason this app exists.
HONEST ABOUT WHAT WE DON'T KNOW
Entries whose shape we could not establish from a plate are marked as drafts, and you can filter them out with one switch. Where an entry takes a plate's lattice but not its fine detail, the entry says so. We would rather tell you the limit than let you cite something that does not hold.
SOURCES
Chiefly Yingzao Fashi (Li Jie, 1103), the oldest surviving official Chinese building standard, and Yuanye (Ji Cheng, 1631), the first Chinese treatise devoted to garden making — both read from public-domain scans — together with museum objects published under CC0.
PRIVACY AND PRICE
No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no ads. The app works fully offline and collects nothing. Browsing, provenance and colour are free for good. A single one-time purchase unlocks exporting — not a subscription.
Show more
