Liuli (琉璃) is the Chinese word for colored glass. Today it names glass beads, glass jewelry and cast glass art. The word is much older than any of these, and over two thousand years it has meant a gem, then glass, then the glazed tiles of palace roofs.
A gem in the sutras
Buddhist translators used liuli for the Sanskrit vaidurya, a precious stone and one of the seven treasures of the sutras. The monk Huilin, who lived from 737 to 820, wrote that liuli is a word from India, vaidurya in Sanskrit.
Scholars still disagree on which stone that was. The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism glosses liuli as beryl. Most translators of the Medicine Buddha's name write lapis lazuli. A 2025 study in the journal Arts traces how the name passed from blue-green gems such as beryl to man-made glass, and later to glazed ceramics.
Glass in ancient China
The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a glass eye bead from the Warring States period, made in the 4th or 3rd century BCE, about 1.6 cm across, with blue, brown and white decoration. Researchers from Oxford and the British Museum count such beads among the first glass objects made in China. Their style follows beads imported from the west, but their lead and barium glass is rare outside China.
The Brooklyn Museum notes that the raised eyes show the influence of beads made in Egypt, India and western Asia to guard against the evil eye. It adds that no evidence shows the Chinese beads were believed to protect anyone. They were most likely worn as ornaments.
Liuli tiles on palace roofs
Glass and glaze look alike and are made in similar ways, so liuli came to mean glaze as well. The Book of Southern Qi already mentions "liuli tiles" on Northern Wei palaces. After the Song dynasty, the Arts study finds, liuli settled on glazed ceramic, and glass took a new name, boli (玻璃). Glazed liuli tiles roofed the palaces and temples of the Yuan, Ming and Qing.
Tile color followed rank. Prince Kung's Palace Museum in Beijing explains that yellow glazed tiles were reserved for imperial palaces and the imperial family's ancestral halls, while city gates, princes' mansions and temples used green. Yellow tiles still cover most roofs of the Forbidden City.
The Buddha of Lapis Lazuli Light
Chinese liturgies chant the Medicine Buddha's name as Yaoshi Liuli Guang Rulai, the Medicine Teacher of Lapis Lazuli Light. His sutra places him in an eastern Pure Land called Pure Lapis Lazuli. The Rubin Museum notes that painters may give him a blue body for the lapis radiance his sutra describes. Our guide to lapis lazuli follows the stone's side of the story.
Cast glass art since 1987
In 1987 an actress and a film director founded a glass studio there, which the Taipei Times called the first glass art workshop in Taiwan or China. They cast glass in lost-wax molds, a technique the studio calls pâte de verre, and chose the old word liuli over boli to honor their cultural roots. In mainland China, glass entered fine art education in 2000, when Tsinghua University's Academy of Arts and Design opened a glass art program. China Daily reports that nearly 30 art schools have added glass programs since.
Liuli at Buddha.store
Our liuli pieces sit among our bracelets, malas and necklaces, and in home and incense. A few to start with:
