Li Tinggui 李廷珪牌

The House

Shexian, in southern Anhui, is the birthplace of Huizhou ink. The archive records that the county was named "China's ink capital" in 2004, and that the Huizhou ink-making technique was placed on the national and Anhui provincial intangible cultural heritage lists in 2006.

The brand takes its name from Li Tinggui, an ink maker of the Southern Tang who worked local materials by the Yishui method and was taken up by the Southern Tang ruler Li Yu, who granted him the imperial surname and made him an ink officer. When Shezhou was renamed Huizhou in 1121, the ink of the region took the name huimo. The Ming was the craft's high period, with four recorded masters — Luo Xiaohua, Cheng Junfang, Fang Yulu, and Shao Gezhi. In the Qing the names recorded are Cao Sugong, Wang Jinsheng, Wang Jie'an, and Hu Kaiwen, whose ink shop was founded in 1782.

The Shexian gazetteer records Cheng Zhongming (1765–1832), of Shendu, who made lacquer-soot ink by burning raw lacquer and oil and compounding the soot with glue. He opened a family ink shop at Shendu in 1778, selling inks named "Li Tinggui" and "Li Tinggui in the antique manner." In 1863 his grandson Cheng Haoting moved the workshop to the west street of Shexian city under the name Li Tinggui Ink House, specialising in lacquer-soot ink.

Industrial carbon-black soot entered the trade in 1910 through Shanghai, and by the early People's Republic four ink houses remained in Shexian — Lao Hu Kaiwen, Hu Kaiwen, Li Tinggui, and Renshanshi. The present company continues the brand: its "Chaoqi-yan" ink took the national product quality gold award in 1989, Li Tinggui Huizhou ink won gold at the 5th Asia-Pacific International Exposition in 1994, and the factory was the Huizhou-ink licensee for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. In 2019 it was entered on the national list of industrial heritage sites.

What They Make

Huizhou ink is made in eight hand stages: collecting soot from lamps burning under inverted porcelain bowls; blending the soot with glue and aromatic medicinal ingredients, pounded into a dough; forming, in which the dough is heated, beaten with a six-pound square hammer, weighed, pressed into a mould and left to cool; drying in a room held at constant temperature and humidity; finishing, with the edges filed and the surface checked as the stick dries; colouring the design with pigment and bronze-gold powder bound in glue; packing in soft or hard form; and carving the mould itself, which carries the calligraphy, painting, and seal engraving of the design. The archive notes that the decisive skill has no measurable index and is passed on by practice beside a master.

Timeline

Passing It On

The archive's inheritor record is for Zhou Meihong, born in 1957 into an ink-making family. He entered the Lao Hu Kaiwen ink factory in 1979 and was named in 2007 by the Ministry of Culture as a national-level representative inheritor of the Huizhou ink-making technique. The company records one national-level inheritor, one provincial-level inheritor, and fifty inheritors at municipal and county level.

Source: China Time-honored Brand Digital Museum, Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). Original record: lzhbwg.mofcom.gov.cn. Translated and condensed from the official Chinese archive; no information has been added. Statements of standing are reproduced as recorded by the source.

Historical facts on this page are compiled from China Time-honored Brand Digital Museum, Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). Designation recorded 2014-12-01. This page is editorial content; it is not a product listing and nothing here is an offer for sale.

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