  We report on a spontaneous breakdown of parity in the ground state of a spin
Hamiltonian involving nearest-neighbor interactions. This occurs for a
one-dimensional model where spins transform under the gauge field
representation of QCD, the eight-dimensional adjoint representation of SU(3).
The ground state spontaneously violates parity and is two-fold degenerate. In
addition, the model possesses a non-vanishing topological string order
parameter which we explicate analytically.
