Writing Brush Making Craftsmanship
01 · Historical Records
In the mid-Ming dynasty, Wengang brushes began to serve as imperial brushes for the palace, priced at 'one tael of gold per shaft.' The development, evolution, technique transmission, and material changes of the Wengang brush-making craft embody the wisdom of artisans through the ages, reflect the social demands of different eras, and serve as a microcosm of the evolution of China's brush industry, holding important historical, cultural, and craft value.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The Wengang brush-making craft is one of the representatives of China's traditional brush-making craft; its area of spread includes 104 natural villages within the jurisdiction of Wengang Town, Jinxian County, Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province, among which Zhoufang Village is the birthplace, and its brush-making craft remains transmitted in good order to this day and keeps radiating to surrounding areas. Jinxian County lies in the Ganfu Plain, north of central Jiangxi and on the south shore of Poyang Lake; local common animals include cattle, pigs, rabbits, dogs, rats, and weasels, and the vegetation is dominated by evergreen trees such as bamboo and camphor—all excellent raw materials for Wengang brush making. Wengang brushes are diverse and complete in categories, divided into eight major classes—wolf hair, goat hair, purple hair, badger, dou brushes, eyebrow brushes, strip screens, and row brushes—with over a thousand varieties, meeting the varied needs of calligraphy, painting, and ceramics making. On the basis of inheriting the common brush-making techniques of antiquity, its craft formed a core technology unique to China's brush industry: shaping the form with the 'cloaking-the-core' method and finishing it with the 'san-zhuo' method. The craft uses natural materials, selects strictly, and works with complexity, comprising a total of 128 steps overall. Among these, the core-hair process has 26 steps; the hair-protecting process 21 steps, including degreasing, aligning, and down-removal; the grass-ash process 11 steps, including burning the pocket, beating the ash, and binding the brush; the shaft-making and core-shaft assembly process 32 steps, including straightening, stamping, notching, and inverting the mouth; the brush-finishing process 21 steps, including setting the shape, applying down, kneading the brush, and combing; and the packaging process 17 steps, including cutting material, grinding, polishing, and stamping characters. The 'Historical Relics of Eastern Jiangxi' records that the Wengang brush craft has a history of over 1,600 years. By modern times, the scale of the Wengang brush industry and its technological level rank among the top in the country.
Process-Step Record
The craft uses natural materials, selects strictly, and works with complexity, comprising a total of 128 steps overall.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
The Wengang brush craft has its origin in Zhoufang Village, Wengang Town, Jinxian County, and spreads continuously across the town's 104 natural villages. Each village specialises differently: the artisans of the Zhoufang line make hard-hair brushes shaped by the cloaking-the-core method and finished by the san-zhuo method, while dou brushes, strip screens, and row brushes are made in separate large-material workshops; among the full 128 steps, the degreasing and down-removal of hair protection and the shape-setting and kneading of brush finishing are the hardest to pass on outside.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Writing Brush Making Craftsmanship · Writing Brush Making Craftsmanship · Writing Brush Making Craftsmanship.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
In recent years, the Wengang brush-making craft has developed as never before; inheritors actively devote themselves to its dissemination and transmission, and brush output and quality carry great weight in the domestic brush market, with output value rising rapidly. At present, Wengang has 786 brush-manufacturing enterprises, plus a large number of brush workshops and online vendors; it produces 760 million brushes a year, and its brush sales account for 75% of the national total, making it an important cultural calling card for Jinxian County and even Jiangxi Province. With 'ten thousand people making brushes and ten thousand selling them,' the item has formed, in the course of its development, a sound atmosphere of transmission and an industrial scale, actively driving employment through industry and benefiting surrounding areas, with economic and social value that cannot be ignored.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Wu Qingchun 04-1928
- Shi Qingpeng 04-1929
- Yang Wen 05-2884
- Zhou Pengcheng
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript; it mirrors the bilingual dossier. 阅读中文版，或返回 英文名录。