Daiyuexuan 戴月轩

The House

Dai Bin, whose courtesy name was Yuexuan, came from Shanlian in Huzhou and opened the Daiyuexuan brush shop on East Liulichang in 1916, taking his own name for the sign. The archive records it as the only brush shop on the old Liulichang cultural street named after a person. It ran on the front-shop, back-workshop model, selling brushes and the four treasures of the study.

Its first plaque was inscribed by Xu Shichang in 1916; Chen Banding and Zhao Puchu later wrote plaques for the shop, and Liang Qichao a couplet. Under the joint public-private operation of 1956 several Liulichang brush shops were gathered beneath it, and the business was renamed the Lao Hu Kaiwen Daiyuexuan Hu Brush and Hui Ink Shop, with a plaque by Guo Moruo. It moved and was renamed more than once in the decades that followed, and was rebuilt in the Liulichang reconstruction completed in 1982, when the Daiyuexuan name was restored together with Chen Banding's plaque. In 2007 it reopened a brush-making workshop, reviving the front-shop, back-workshop model.

Its brushes were used by the painter Qi Baishi and the writers Lu Xun and Guo Moruo, and after 1949 for Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Dai Bin was close to Qi Baishi and Zhang Boju, and He Xiangning painted an ink-plum picture with a Daiyuexuan brush and gave it to him. After China and Japan normalised relations, Japanese calligraphy groups visited the shop, and the calligraphers Nakayama Suyue and Yanagida Taizan ordered brushes there.

What They Make

The house makes Huzhou-style brushes by the pile-and-post method (pizhu fa). From raw material to finished head the craft runs to more than a hundred steps, working toward the four virtues of a brush — sharp, even, round, and resilient (jian, qi, yuan, jian): a tip that holds without splaying, bristles level when pressed, and a head both firm and supple. The heads use goat hair, hare fur, weasel hair, and badger guard hair; the handles bamboo or wood.

The work divides into a water stage (shuipen), where the hair is combed and washed to clear the down, aligned, cut, and built up and rounded into a head, and a dry stage (ganzuo), where the head is bound and set in the handle and then selected, trimmed, and engraved. A single brush can take one to two hundred steps. The house kept the Huzhou technique of tip-matching (peifeng) for goat-hair brushes and added the firmness found in northern weasel-hair work.

Timeline

Passing It On

The technique has passed through five generations. The first was Dai Bin (1880–1963), who mastered the tip-matching of goat-hair brushes and opened the way to giving them firmer bodies, and who trained more than thirty apprentices. The second included Li Shuyuan (1920–2013), apprenticed in 1938 and known for his engraving, and Zheng Cunzong, apprenticed in 1944, who spent decades at the dry stage's brush-selecting work. The third was Jin Baogang (born 1945), apprenticed in 1962. The fourth were Yu Tianying (born 1955) and Chen Peixin, both apprenticed in 1993. The fifth are Wang Houxian (born 1976), who works on the water stage, and Teng Zhanmin (born 1971), apprenticed in 2007 and known for engraving the handle; both now train apprentices of their own.

Source: official materials published by Beijing Daiyuexuan Hu Brush & Hui Ink Co., Ltd. Translated and condensed from the house's own record; no information has been added.

Historical facts on this page come from Official materials published by Beijing Daiyuexuan Hu Brush & Hui Ink Co., Ltd. Designation recorded 2006-11-07. This page is editorial content; it is not a product listing and nothing here is an offer for sale.

Independence. Time-Honored Goods is an independent multi-brand store. We are not the official site of Daiyuexuan, and we do not speak for the house. See Independence & Sourcing.