Yidege 一得阁

The House

Yidege was founded in 1865, when Xie Songdai opened a shop on East Liulichang in Beijing making and selling liquid ink. Xie, born in 1849, came to Beijing from Hunan in 1860. The archive records that he worked through repeated failures before he solved the problems that had kept ink from being bottled — uneven colour, clogging, and running when a mounted work was pasted — and so produced liquid ink, in place of grinding an ink stick on a stone.

The shop's name comes from the couplet Xie wrote for its front hall — "one craft is enough to serve the world; its methods come mostly from the books of the ancients" — taking yi and de from the two lines. The archive records that candidates sitting the metropolitan examination bought the ink in numbers.

Xie Songdai died in 1898 and the technique passed to his apprentice Xu Jiebin, the house's first-generation inheritor. Xu moved the business to Guang'anmen Street and set up a workshop of more than thirty rooms for burning lampblack, using tung, peanut, and bean oil and pine resin for the smoke blacks from which the inks were compounded. In 1925 he registered the house's trademark with the Republican Bureau of Agriculture and Commerce. The archive records that during the Japanese occupation he refused repeated approaches from merchants seeking to buy the ink formula.

After 1953, when the shop moved to Nanxinhua Street, annual output reached more than 40,000 bottles; under joint public-private operation from 1956 it rose past 140,000, and mechanical production brought it past ten million a year by the mid-1960s. The ink-making technique was inscribed on the national intangible cultural heritage list in 2014. The archive records that in 1996 the ink formula and technique, with the house's eight-treasure vermilion paste, were classified by the Beijing science commission as state secret technical projects.

What They Make

The ink is compounded from lampblack and a top-grade bone glue, with borneol, musk, and rock sugar among some dozen aromatic and medicinal ingredients; the archive describes the result as carrying a faint medicinal scent. The recipe is adjusted through the year for changes in climate, and several steps — dissolving the glue, blending the ingredients, tempering the vermilion paste — the archive states cannot yet be done by machine.

Traditional accounts set out eight stages, from taking the smoke to forming the ink into sticks. The method was written down by the family — in Xie Songdai's Notes on Ink-making at the Imperial College (1884) and his brother's Sequel to the Four Records of the Study (1890).

The ink can be used in five gradations, from burnt to pale — jiao, nong, zhong, dan, and qing — which the archive gives as the basis for shading in ink painting. Beyond ink the house makes ink sticks, seal paste, seal pads and oil, and artists' colours.

Timeline

Passing It On

The archive records that the line was set outside the family from the start. Xie Songdai passed the technique to his apprentice Xu Jiebin, and selection has since weighed character and aptitude rather than descent. Apprentices were taken by subject, and the formula was kept to a small number of qualified makers. By 2019 the company had trained twenty fourth-generation inheritors of the technique.

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 2016-07-10. This page is editorial content; it is not a product listing and nothing here is an offer for sale.

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