An ongon is not a picture. It is a small human figure drawn or cut onto a scrap of cloth, bound about with fur, hair and bent metal, then fed with milk and fat and kept in the smoke of the hearth. The recorded Buryat ongon Zuraktan sits on blue daba — cheap Chinese plain-weave cotton, dyed unevenly indigo, traded the length of Siberia.

So the ground is that textile: dark, coarse, smoke-filmed. The blue that answers it is khadag blue, the colour of the Eternal Blue Sky tied onto ovoo cairns. Everything else on the page is material — sable and ermine, lamp-black, dulled tin, a red forehead.