Ruyangliu 汝阳刘

The House

The archive traces the brush to Meng Tian, a general of the Qin, and to Liu Yin, a scribe in his command and an ancestor of the Liu family of Ruyangliu village, who is recorded as improving and passing on the technique — a line the archive puts at more than two thousand years. In 1354 the village's brush-makers built a temple to Meng Tian and a shrine to Liu Yin, and the third day of the third lunar month, Meng Tian's birthday, was kept as both a temple fair and the day for taking on apprentices.

The village name is credited to the Han founding emperor. In 195 BCE, returning to Chang'an after putting down a rebellion, Liu Bang stopped at his home county of Pei and held a banquet, at which he sang and then wrote out a song with a brush. Finding the brush awkward in the hand, he was told of Liu Yin of Yangcheng, whose "Meng Tian brushes" were held in high regard. Liu Bang summoned him, and observing that the village stood north of the Ru river — the yang side — declared that it should be called Ruyangliu. He then required Liu Yin to send brushes to the court each year, and they were thereafter court tribute.

The archive also records the brushes reaching Wang Xizhi: he wrote the Huangting Jing with one and praised it as a marvellous brush — after which the village was known as the home of the marvellous brush.

The present company was founded in 2005 at Xiangcheng. The archive describes it as one of the largest brush-making enterprises in the country, making student brushes, brushes for calligraphy and painting, and gift sets in more than 200 specifications, with an annual capacity of 60 million brushes sold across China and exported to Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and more than twenty other countries and regions.

What They Make

Brushes are made in 128 processes. The hair is chosen by kind: weasel-tail hair taken after winter and worked by the house's "dry knock, dry press" technique; purple-hare hair from the second layer on a wild hare's back, worked by a process the archive gives as its own; goat hair from young goats not yet neutered or mated, clipped between the start of winter and the start of spring; and badger hair from winter pelts. Aligning, padding, cutting, and combing are the decisive steps.

The archive sets out the house's standards as three qualities — the head precise, pure, and beautiful — and four virtues: a tip that comes to a point without splitting; bristles level when spread; a head round and even, so the brush turns freely; and hair springy enough to recover its point.

Timeline

Passing It On

The archive's inheritor record is for Liu Haoqin, born in 1960, given as the 66th-generation representative inheritor of the technique. He is recorded as a China brush-making master and a provincial craft master, and as a provincial-level representative inheritor of the brush-making intangible cultural heritage. He devised the weasel-hair "dry knock, dry press" technique, led the development of the Zijian small regular-script brush, and drafted the provincial production standard for it, which the archive records as the first such standard in the brush trade.

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 2012-08-21. 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 Ruyangliu, and we do not speak for the house. See Independence & Sourcing.