On July 6, 2026, the Suzhou Intermediate People's Court issued its first-instance judgment in Louis Vuitton Malletier v. Jasmine Milk White, a Chinese tea-and-dairy brand: Jasmine Milk White was ordered to pay Louis Vuitton ¥10 million in damages for trademark infringement plus ¥300,000 in legal expenses — ¥10.3 million in total. The moment the verdict was published, social media erupted. Netizens pulled out the four-petal baoxiang flower carved into a Tang-dynasty pipa, the lattice carvings of Suzhou garden windows, and pressed the same question: this four-leaf flower has lived in China for centuries — how has it become Louis Vuitton's "exclusive" mark?
The legal answer is cold and crisp: LV's diamond-and-flower combination mark has been registered for forty years and has been recognized as a well-known mark, so its legal force is extremely stable. Even if its design was demonstrably inspired by traditional Chinese motifs, as long as that motif was not previously registered by anyone else as a trademark, LV's registration cannot be invalidated on those grounds. China's trademark law was built late; traditional motifs, as a public cultural resource, have almost no defensive capacity within the trademark-law framework.
The structural predicament of traditional Chinese motifs inside the contemporary trademark regime: a public cultural resource that has lasted a millennium has no "creator" — and therefore no right-holder; no right-holder, no legal defense. When an international brand files a trademark first on a motif drawn from Chinese tradition, the actual inheritors of that tradition end up on the wrong side of an infringement suit.
A Thousand-Year Motif, One-Day Trademark
The motif at the center of Jasmine Milk White's logo is called shìdì wén — the "persimmon-calyx pattern," named for its resemblance to the calyx of a persimmon. Silk-industry expert Hang Hang, deputy general manager of Suzhou Jinda Silk Co., Ltd. and a Doctor of Art Studies from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, traces the motif back to the Neolithic era. The Nanjing Museum holds a Neolithic painted pottery bowl with white slip, red and black pigment, on whose surface early persimmon-calyx patterns already appear.
From Neolithic pottery to Tang-dynasty pipa's baoxiang flowers to Ming- and Qing-dynasty furniture carvings, the persimmon-calyx pattern has been passed down across millennia of Chinese civilization. It is not the creation of any single ethnicity, nor the patent of any single dynasty — it is the cumulative work of generations of unnamed artisans, refined and evolved over time. Precisely for that reason, it belongs to the public domain. But "belonging to the public domain" carries no substantive defensive force in law.
LV's diamond-and-flower combination mark was registered in the 1980s. Over the forty years since, through continued use and enforcement, it has come to be recognized as a well-known mark. Well-known marks enjoy cross-class protection — meaning that even though Jasmine Milk White operates in a different product category from LV, the court may still find infringement. This is not the first such case, and it will not be the last.
A Genealogy of Pattern-Collision
More sobering still, this is no isolated incident. Givenchy designs have been pointed out as closely resembling Shang- and Zhou-dynasty bronze-ware motifs; Celine designs have been compared with Qing-palace bracelet forms. When an international brand's design "collides" with a traditional Chinese motif, the path is almost always the same:
If the brand does not register the relevant mark, the design remains in the public domain and anyone may use it; if the brand files first, the contemporary Chinese users of the tradition become the "infringers." Lifting a traditional motif out of the public domain and privatizing it costs almost nothing — and the price of that privatization is enormous.
On the same day, the account Baorong Wanwu Hengheshui (an essayist blog covering Chinese intellectual history) took up another telling topic — whether the word "constellation" was originally a Chinese term. Tracing from Dunhuang manuscript P.2512 to the Bu Tiange star-catalog and onward to the Yongle Dadian encyclopedia, the writer documents that "constellation" already had a millennium of usage inside the Chinese star-official system, long before any Western import. Two seemingly unrelated topics, but they point at the same structural predicament: what counts as "Chinese" is judged by utterly different standards in the cultural register and in the legal register. Culturally, the persimmon-calyx pattern is Chinese; under trademark law, whoever registers first owns it.
The Institutional Crevice of Public-Copyright Defense
China's trademark system took shape in 1982. It has been amended several times since, but on the question of how to provide defensive protection for traditional motifs as a public cultural resource, there is still no clear institutional arrangement.
Three lines of thinking are currently feasible:
- Build a public-copyright database of traditional motifs. Led by the National Intellectual Property Administration or the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the known traditional motifs could be systematically catalogued and digitized, with a structure modeled on the China Intangible Cultural Heritage Digital Museum. Once such a database exists, trademark examiners reviewing applications that contain motif elements could use it as a reference for prior public resources. But this would require multi-department coordination and substantial funding.
- Refine a "public-domain reservation" clause in trademark law. The current Article 11 of the Trademark Law bars from registration any sign that "directly indicates only the quality, main raw material, function, intended use, weight, quantity, or other characteristics of the goods" — but traditional motifs generally fall outside that scope. To build a special exception — "public cultural marks are not registrable" — would require legislative argument about what counts as a "traditional" motif, how many years of history it must have, and what archaeological evidence is needed. The precision demanded by statute and the blurry boundaries of culture are inherently in tension.
- Use the Anti-Unfair Competition Law as a fallback. For clearly abusive behavior that uses a traditional motif to create "source confusion," case-by-case relief is available through the general principles of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law — but this obviously cannot stop the motif from being filed as a trademark in the first place.
The Misalignment Between "Right of Use" and "Right of Ownership"
The public sentiment that the Jasmine Milk White verdict unleashed is, at bottom, a misalignment between "cultural right of use" and "legal right of ownership."
The public intuition is simple: a pattern that has circulated for thousands of years should belong to everyone. Trademark law says: whoever registers first, whoever uses it first and achieves market recognition, owns the legal exclusive right.
The crux is that the "creator" of a traditional motif has already disappeared in contemporary society — these patterns are the cumulative product of collective creation, passed down through generations. And the foundational logic of trademark law is that "creative labor deserves legal protection." When the specific designer of a motif is untraceable, no claim can attach to any natural or legal person.
This is precisely the institutional crevice in which traditional motifs are trapped: no creator, no right-holder; no right-holder, no defensive capacity.
The legal community's answer is realistic and unsparing. To try to invalidate LV's mark on the grounds that it "derives from a traditional Chinese motif" is exceedingly difficult. LV's diamond-and-flower combination mark has been registered for forty years and has been recognized as a well-known mark, so its legal force is extremely stable. Even if its design was demonstrably inspired by traditional Chinese motifs, as long as that motif was not previously registered by anyone else as a trademark, LV's registration cannot be invalidated on those grounds.
The lesson this verdict leaves for guofeng (national-style) brands is that commercial efforts to carry forward Eastern aesthetics cannot be built on the cultural intuition that "it was ours in the first place." They must be laid out in advance inside the trademark-law framework. The game over traditional motifs is, in the end, a long war fought in the institutional crevice to secure a place for public cultural resources.