Basic Introduction to Hu Pen
The origin of the Hu pen is in Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province. The selection of materials for Hu pens is meticulous, and the craftsmanship is exquisite. There are many varieties available, ranging from those as thick as a bowl's mouth to those as fine as embroidery needles. They have four distinctive features: sharpness, alignment, roundness, and resilience. Sharpness: the tip of the pen is as sharp as a cone; Alignment: when the tip is flattened, it is as neat as a knife cut; Roundness: the head of the pen is full and round; Resilience: the tip stands upright and has good elasticity. Hu pens are categorized into four types: goat hair, wolf hair, mixed hair, and purple hair. According to size specifications, they can be further divided into large, medium, small, and extra-small.
Product Characteristics
The Hu pen replaced the Xuan pen not only due to historical reasons but also because of its inherent quality, which includes both technical standards in production and quality standards in writing performance. These can be summarized as the “Three Virtues and Four Merits.”
“Three Virtues”:
“Three Virtues” refer to precision, purity, and beauty. From a technical standpoint: “Precision” means that each of the 72 processes, including sorting, soaking, separating, combing, binding, matching, selecting, and assembling, is carried out with meticulous care; “Purity” refers to the strict and meticulous selection of raw materials, adopting an attitude of selecting one hair from thousands; “Beauty” means a high degree of unity in shape, color, as well as the coordination of the quill, engraving, and decoration.
“Four Merits”: “Four Merits” refer to “alignment, sharpness, roundness, and resilience.” From the perspective of writing performance: “Alignment” means the head of the pen is full and thick, allowing for even ink flow; “Sharpness” indicates that the tip is sharp and does not split, making it suitable for hooks and strokes; “Roundness” means the pen can turn smoothly and freely; “Resilience” means the pen is durable, does not scatter or fray, and has good elasticity, thereby highlighting the writer's brushwork strength.
The second characteristic of the Hu pen is adherence to traditional calligraphic techniques. According to Fang Yizhi of the Ming Dynasty, a good pen must possess “core, sheath, column, and adjunct,” which aligns with the statement in “The Pen Classic” that “the strong hairs should be in front, the soft ones behind, the strong ones form the cutting edge, and the softer ones provide support.” This means that within a single brush tip, there must be a core made of sharp hairs, surrounded by fine hairs, with the best hairs at the peak of the core, and the supporting hairs cannot be neglected.
The third characteristic of the Hu pen is its wide variety. Currently, pens can be classified into three categories based on their usage: calligraphy and painting, industrial, and special-purpose. Based on performance, they can be divided into soft, hard, and mixed. These categories use over ten different types of animal hair and other feather materials. For example, hard hairs like weasel (ermine tail), stone badger, horsehair, pig bristles, and mountain rabbit fur are used for their strength, producing bold, forceful, and smooth strokes. Soft hairs like goat hair are long and sharp, providing soft, rounded strokes that hold ink well and produce endless variations in ink color and brushwork when used appropriately. Mixed hairs combine hardness and softness, making them suitable for both calligraphy and painting. When categorized by size, length, thickness, and thinness, there are hundreds of different varieties, similar to those found in many other Chinese pen-producing regions.
History and Folklore
The Hu pen, known for its “outstanding skill in hair tips,” has a history spanning more than two thousand years. Originating in Huzhou City, Zhejiang Province, it is therefore called the Hu pen. The Hu pen is one of the “Four Treasures of the Study” and is renowned as the “king of all pens.” Shanlian Town, the hometown of the Hu pen, has a legend that General Meng Tian of the Qin Dynasty invented the hair pen using “dried wood for the tube, deer hair as the core, and goat hair as the sheath.” Therefore, the town has a temple dedicated to Meng Tian. The tip of a Hu pen features a neatly aligned and transparent section, typically made from superior-quality mountain goat hair through nearly a hundred processes, including soaking, separating, combining, and assembling. Bai Juyi once described the meticulous craftsmanship of pen-making as “selecting one hair from thousands” and “though light, the effort is immense,” hence the saying “outstanding skill in hair tips worldwide.”