Black Dragon Cafe

There are three main types of brush in Chinese traditional ink painting, soft, hard and mixed:

SOFT Brush(软毫 ruǎn háo)
These highly absorbent brushes are also referred to as “goat hair” (羊毫 yáng háo) brushes. They give a soft, saturated stroke.

HARD Brush(硬毫 yìng háo)
Resilient brushes that easily spring back to their original shape, and known as “wolf” hair brushes (狼毫 láng háo). “Wolf” is a mistranslation, as this is an abbreviation using just one character from the word for weasel (黄鼠狼 huáng shǔ láng, literally “yellow rat-wolf”). Weasel brush just doesn’t have the same ring to it, though.

Hard brushes also use rabbit fur, deer, and marten. Due to the darker colour of these brushes, they are also referred to as “purple” brushes (紫毫 zǐ háo – strictly speaking only refers to rabbit hair).

MIXED Brush (兼毫 jiān háo)
A mix of soft and hard brush hairs. So for example you might see “Seven purple three goat” (七紫三羊 qī zǐ sān yang), meaning seven parts rabbit and three parts goat hair. Beginners usually start off using mixed hair brushes.

Huzhou city (湖州 hú zhōu) in northern Zhejiang province is China’s most famous producer of brushes, known as “hu bi” (湖笔 hú bǐ).

Over the past couple days there has been the distant splinter and pop of firecrackers, in just another three days it will be Spring Festival.

The spring tradition of writing poetic couplets to be placed around the doorway never disappeared from China, though it was stifled in the 1960s as a superstition. This year is the first time that I’ve seen quite a few street-side calligraphers offering to write a phrase for a couple kuai – before all I could find were those kitschy factory produced ones with glitter, accompanied by pictures of vaguely disturbing fat babies.

As for fireworks, there are even chaoji nvsheng Mongolian Yogurt Super Girl Pop Contest ones, should you wish to see Li Yuchun shoot sixty feet in the air and explode.