Tell me about the origin and correlation of "writing brush"!

Brush has a long history in China. The original brush was used to describe Oracle Bone Inscriptions's strokes, but the real writing with a brush may have started with the words on bamboo slips and tapestries.

Legend has it that Meng Tian, the general sent by Qin Shihuang to build the Great Wall, took a brush made of Zhongshan rabbit hair. However, modern scholars believe that the writing brush existed long before Meng Tian. Judging from 1954, the Warring States writing brush unearthed in Zuogongshan, Changsha, is indeed made of rabbit hair. But this kind of pen is different from the present one. Its nib is made of rabbit hair wrapped around a bamboo tube, hemp and lacquer juice. This pen is strong and suitable for writing. This is the earliest existing writing brush in China. Later, with the development of calligraphy and painting, pen-making technology also developed. According to the needs of users, pen artists tried various animal hairs as raw materials, such as deer hair, badger hair, pig hair, chicken feathers, rabbit hair, wool, ferret hair and so on. As a result, they found that rabbit hair, weasel hair and wool have the best performance, and they have been widely used since then, becoming the three major raw materials for pen making.

According to different raw materials and properties, brushes can be divided into three types: bristles, bristles and double brushes. Hard brushes are purple brushes made of old rabbit neck hair and wolf brushes made of weasel tail hair, both of which are brown, hard and elastic, and have less water storage, and the drawn lines are vigorous and smooth. In landscape painting, the vertical trunk, branches, hooked leaves and pointed leaves of trees, the outline and extension of fine lines such as rocks, houses, figures, boats, bridges, water waves and waterfalls need to be expressed with strong elasticity. Soft brush made of sheep hair is soft and has strong water storage capacity. Landscape painting is often rendered with it. Rice-dotted landscape and splash-ink landscape are also commonly used sheep hair, which can receive the effect of full pen and ink. Double brush is made of hard hair and soft hair. There are purple wolf hair, purple wool, chicken wolf hair and other varieties. The hardness is between wolf hair and wool, which can be selected according to personal habits and needs.

In addition, according to the length of strokes, the brush has different performances such as long strokes, middle strokes and short strokes. Long front is easy to draw beautiful lines, short front is easy to make lines dignified and heavy, and it is appropriate to draw mountains and rivers with centers. According to the size of the nib, brushes are divided into three types: small, medium and large. All kinds of landscapes should be prepared. Generally, a small landscape, a big landscape, a little white cloud and a big white cloud, and a bigger bucket pen will do. How sharp the new pen is, it is only suitable for drawing thin lines, and the effect of rubbing, wiping and knocking the old pen is good. Some painters like to use a bald pen, and the dotted line is not vigorous and simple. A good brush has four characteristics: round, neat, sharp and healthy, and it is handy to use. Brush should be cleaned in time after use to avoid dry ink damage.

In the history of pen-making in China, there are two centers: Xu Anbi (Xuancheng, Anhui) and Hubi (Huzhou, Zhejiang). Now the brushes produced in Shanghai, Suzhou, Beijing, Chengdu and other places also enjoy high reputation.