Traditional Chinese Colours and Their Hex Codes

In traditional Chinese thought, colour was organised by the five elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. Each element carried a colour, a direction and a season. Colour was therefore never purely decorative — it encoded a relationship between things.

This is why Chinese colour names often reference a material rather than a hue. 朱 (zhū) is vermilion, but it names the mineral cinnabar. 黛 (dài) is a blue-black, but it originally named the pigment used to paint eyebrows.

These five are the backbone of Chinese colour vocabulary. Everything else is a variation, a pigment name, or a poetic description of light.

Hex codes are a modern invention and traditional pigments do not map onto them precisely. The values below are practical approximations for screen and print work, chosen to stay close to the historical pigments rather than to look saturated on a monitor.

Traditional palettes work because they are low in saturation and high in contrast between warm and cool. The safest approach is to pick one dominant elemental colour, one paper tone as the ground, and one ink tone for text — then resist adding a fourth.

For print, always convert to CMYK and proof on paper. Vermilion and indigo in particular shift noticeably between screen and press, and the muted paper tones can turn grey if printed on bright white stock.