The Treasure (Bao) Knot

Generalities

Just as the mystic knot is a variant of the cloverleaf knot but also an entire family of knots as well, the singled treasure knot is a cloverleaf knot. The treasure knot is a literal sideways expansion of cloverleaf knots. Instead of one ear and one structural loop per side of a polygon, multiple loops are created in parallel for each side.

Nomenclature

I came by the instructions for this particular family of knots from a single book. At the time I had difficulty parsing the sparse, mostly text based instructions and there seemed to be 2 distinct types of knots, so I decided to split them "bao" for the basic set and "treasure" for the apparently more complex set. Of course, bǎo is the romanization of "寶" which means treasure. Also, 寶 (bǎo) is a toneme with 包 (bāo) which means wrap, so "bao" seemed like a particularly good idea at the time. Eventually I understood that the treasure knot was, in fact, a woven version of the bao knot, so there was, in fact, no real distinction. But, having used it thus for many years, changing it back to treasure seemed needlessly confusing. So, sorry again for introducing naming confusion.

Only ABoK #2463 bears any resemblance to any of this family of knots (woven bao 4x2), so there is no other contamination or issues in the name space.

The treasure is a polygonal knot, but it is not just radially symmetric, there is a dimension of side "length" that defines the treasure that the cloverleaf does not have. If we think of the cloverleaf with 3 ears as the singled triangular treasure (treasure 3x1), then this would be the quadrupled triangular treasure (treasure 3x4, 12 ears in total). In Chinese, it is written 三寶四套 (traditional) or 三宝四套 (simplified), sān bǎo sì tào (pinyin). "套" being "set". Japanese uses the same set notation.

To reiterate, the number of sides define the general shape and I use polygonal terminology for that. For the number of loops per side I use tuple names. That can get awfully long and wordy, for instance a two-sided treasure knot with 12 loops per side would be a duodectuple digonal treasure knot. For brevity (also for people that don't think looking up obscure mathematical terminology is fun) and similar to the Chinese, I use s x n for sides x number of loops (also, when I'm abbreviating, I'll often use "bao" vs "treasure" then as well).

Although it is never spoken of, you can create a 2 eared cloverleaf knot, but it is just a reef knot turned on its side. The two sided bao (digonal bao 2xn) is very popular.

How To