ART
BEAUTY & WELLNESS
CRAFT
CULTURE & HISTORY
ENTERTAINMENT
ENVIRONMENT
FOOD & DRINKS
REVERSE ENGINEERING
SCIENCES
SPORTS
TECHNOLOGY
WEARABLES
Inkstick: Soot and Glue Pounded Thirty Thousand Times, Qimin Yaoshu
The inkstick recipe in Jia Sixie's Qimin Yaoshu (6th century): fine soot and glue, 16 to 5 by weight, the glue soaked in ash-bark water, with egg white, pounded in an iron mortar thirty thousand times and made into small sticks. Ground on an inkstone with a little water, a stick gives black ink.
The picture: an Eastern Han dynasty inkstick (photo by Gary Todd, Wikimedia Commons, CC0).
Intermediate
Weeks
Instructions
1
1
Watch: soot to inkstick
Watch: soot to inkstick
Goldthread visits an Anhui inkstick maker: soot collected, pounded with glue, shaped into sticks (no talking).
2
2
Sieve the soot
Sieve the soot
Pound good pure soot and sift it through fine silk inside a jar. It is so light that sifted in the open it flies away.
Materials for this step:
Lamp Black1 jinTools needed:
Mortar and Pestle
Silk Fabric
Ceramic Storage Jar with Lid3
3
Soak the glue in ash-bark water
Soak the glue in ash-bark water
For each jin of soot take 5 liang of good glue and soak it in water with ash bark. The bark turns the water green, dissolves the glue and deepens the black.
Materials for this step:
Animal Glue5 liang
Ash Bark1 piece
Water1 pieceTools needed:
Ceramic Storage Jar with Lid
Balance Scale4
4
Add egg white
Add egg white
Add the whites of 5 eggs, yolks removed, and mix everything together. (Jia also adds cinnabar and musk; they are left out here.)
Materials for this step:
Egg5 pcsTools needed:
Ceramic Storage Jar with Lid5
5
Pound 30,000 times
Pound 30,000 times
Put it in an iron mortar, stiff rather than wet, and pound 30,000 strokes. The more, the better.
Tools needed:
Mortar and Pestle6
6
Make small sticks
Make small sticks
Shape sticks of no more than 2 to 3 liang: better small than big. Make ink only in the 2nd or 9th month. In warm weather it spoils and stinks; in the cold it dries badly and crumbles in the wind.
Tools needed:
Balance ScaleMaterials
5- 1 jinPlaceholder
- 5 liangPlaceholder
- 1 piecePlaceholder
- 1 piecePlaceholder
- 5 pcsPlaceholder
Tools Required
4- Placeholder
- Placeholder
- Placeholder
- Placeholder
This blueprint makes
Related Blueprints
These blueprints share knowledge with this one — techniques, materials, or principles that connect them in the learning graph.
CC0 Public Domain
This blueprint is released under CC0. You are free to copy, modify, distribute, and use this work for any purpose, without asking permission.
Support the Maker by purchasing products through their Blueprint where they earn a Maker Commission set by Vendors, or create a new iteration of this Blueprint and include it as a connection in your own Blueprint to share revenue.