Brush making skills (Zhou Huchen's brush making skills)

Chinese national intangible cultural heritage Name: brush making skills (Zhou Huchen's brush making skills)

Applicant: Huangpu District, Shanghai

Project No.: 1180

Project No.: VIII - 200

Time of publication: 2011 (the third batch)

Category: traditional art

Region: Shanghai

Type: new item

Applicant: Huangpu District, Shanghai

Protection unit: Shanghai zhouhuchen Cao Sugong pen and Ink Co., Ltd

Introduction to brush making skills (Zhou Huchen's brush making skills)

Applicant: Huangpu District, Shanghai

The production process of a brush is very complicated and delicate. The production of a brush has to go through more than 70 processes, including five major processes, from selection to lettering. Zhou Huchen's brush making technique was named after the founder Zhou Huchen, and was accumulated by Zhou Huchen's brush and ink factory in more than 300 years.

In 1694, Zhou Huchen's descendants came from Jiangxi to Suzhou to set up Zhou Huchen's Bimo village. After the opening of Shanghai port, zhouhuchen bimozhuang moved from Suzhou to Huangpu District in 1862. In 1958, it merged ten famous pen and ink houses in Shanghai and established the old Zhou Huchen pen and ink house. In 1987, the company expanded its scale and established Shanghai Laozhou Huchen pen factory. It has lasted for 300 years and passed on for 11 generations.

Zhou Huchen integrated all kinds of pen making skills, and combined the advantages of each family. On the basis of inheriting the traditional skills, he constantly innovated pen making skills, from making Langhao water pen, to making yanghao and Jianhao to making Langhao painting and calligraphy pen. Combined with the characteristics of Shanghai style painters and calligraphers, he created pen making techniques such as "waist strengthening method", "top leveling method", "layer peak method", "refined method" and animal hair“ The "configuration method" improves the use function of the brush, expresses the characteristics of the brush making skills in the past hundreds of years, and pushes the Shanghai style brush making skills to a new height.

At present, the market of writing brush is shrinking day by day. The production of writing brush is all manual work, complicated and laborious, with low social status and poor wages. Young people are not interested in learning skills. As time goes by, there is no successor in writing brush production industry, which is on the verge of crisis.