Paint It Black--Ink Maker Chen Chia-te

These days, Taiwan's last remaining ink maker is something of an urban recluse, his shop tucked away in a remote corner of the city. For nearly half a century, he has borne the stifling heat and complex manufacturing process, determined to produce block after block of quality hand-made ink. But it hasn't always been this way. The industry had its day in the sun in the 1970s, when the economy was booming and the study of calligraphy compulsory.

Sadly, with the emergence of the technological society and the acceleration of life's pace fewer and fewer young people are "grinding the ink and laying out the paper" to practice calligraphy. These days, the scent of ink has almost been forgotten. Tough times for the industry were made worse by the liberalization of cross-strait trade in 1990. Inexpensive mainland Chinese inks flooded the Taiwan market, striking another blow to the livelihood of the island's few remaining ink makers. In the years since then, these craftsmen have aged and their numbers dwindled still further. Today, Chen Chia-te is the only one left, the last ink maker in Taiwan committed to producing high-quality hand-made inks.

Getting the soot, removing impurities, measuring and grinding the ingredients, mixing the ink.... The illustrations in the ancient Ink Recipes show us ink making's long history.

National Legacy ink shop

The scent of ink drifts from an alley in Taipei County's Sanchung all day long, wafting not from a painting and calligraphy studio, but rather from Taiwan's only remaining manufacturer of handmade inks-the Ta-yu Ink Factory. This dark, tiny workshop is a one-man operation, its manufacturing and sales handled entirely by Chen Chia-te, winner of the 2003 Global Chinese Culture and Arts Award.

Born in Lutsao, Chiayi County in 1942, Chen journeyed to Taipei on his own in search of work after graduating from primary school. At 13, a counselor with a career placement service in the area just north of the Taipei Station asked him, "Do you want to learn to make ink?" Chen was not long out of school, and the mention of ink immediately stirred warm memories of schooldays spent grinding ink and practicing calligraphy. Curious to catch a glimpse of how ink was made, he immediately nodded in agreement. Just like that, he was apprenticed to National Legacy Ink Shop, a Sanchung ink factory located in the shadow of the Taipei Bridge, and embarked on what has been a 50-year-career in ink making.

National Legacy Ink Shop was owned by Lin Hsiang-chu, a master ink maker originally from the Fuzhou area of mainland China. Lin had been visiting Taiwan at age 18 when the resumption of the civil war on the mainland ended cross-strait contacts. Forced by circumstance to stay in Taiwan, he opened an ink shop and put down roots.

The young Chen began his apprenticeship sweeping floors and preparing ingredients. A simple, hard-working boy from the country, he soon earned Lin's trust. In his third year at the shop, Lin began to teach him to make ink sticks, sharing his best techniques and encouraging the boy by telling him, "If you learn this trade well, you'll amount to something in society." Chen remembered Lin's every word, and chose to stay on at National Legacy as a master ink maker once he finished his apprenticeship.

With the art of crafting hand-made ink in danger of being lost in Taiwan, ink-lovers have urged Chen to make his inks entirely by hand, the better to imprint a lifetime of skill upon the ink.

Lampblack ink, pine-soot ink

When Lin retired in 1974, he gave some of his ink molds and other tools to Chen, and suggested he set up his own shop. Chen heeded his advice and established the Ta-yu Ink Factory in the same neighborhood, thereby becoming the proprietor of one of only three ink-manufacturing workshops in Taiwan. In fact, at that point Chen himself was one of the only three remaining master ink makers on the island. In those early days, his customers were primarily painters, calligraphers and students, but even the students were few and his sales were limited.

During Chen's apprenticeship and in Ta-yu's early years, lampblack ink was his primary product. One obtains the lampblack used in this ink by burning a wick in a pot of tung oil. When the oil has burned away, the lampblack is scraped from the inner surface of a steel lid or a funnel-like steel shade. But as the years went on, Chen realized that lampblack was a pollutant, and began manufacturing pine-soot ink instead.

As the name implies, pine-soot ink is made with pine wood soot, which is then processed with Borneo camphor (Dryobalanops aromatica) musk, and cowhide glue. To make a finely textured ink that mixes well and is evenly colored, an ink maker must use the finest and lightest pine soot, which Taiwan imports from Germany.

Cowhide glue is an industrial glue made by rendering cow hides. Cowhide glue is an animal product, and can smell bad if it is of poor quality. Ink makers are careful to select high-quality glues, which produce a lustrous ink that is thick without being tacky and doesn't inhibit the motion of a brush. They give still more care to the ratio of glue to pine soot. If too much glue is used, the calligrapher's brush will drag. If there is too little, the ink will lack luster. Borneo camphor, meanwhile, is drawn from traditional Chinese medicine and has a cool, clean fragrance, while musk prevents decay and gives ink sticks a refreshing scent.

While one might think pine-soot ink is simple enough to make, in fact, a tremendous amount of knowledge goes into selecting the ingredients and mixing them in the proper ratios. Lin taught Chen the standard proportions when Chen was still an apprentice, but these days most of his materials are imported. They come from different nations and different suppliers. Even materials from the same supplier vary from lot to lot in their specific properties and moisture content. Chen must rely on his many years of experience to adjust the amount of water he adds.

Chen checks the moisture content of each batch of pine soot by rubbing it in his hands and adjusts the amount of water he adds accordingly. If the soot is too dry, it is stiff and resists moving when he rolls it in his hands. The thickness of the glue, on the other hand, is determined by the quality of the hides and the method used to process them. Chen first soaks a little of each batch he imports to test its adhesiveness. A glue that is insufficiently tacky means ink sticks that crack.

Getting the soot, removing impurities, measuring and grinding the ingredients, mixing the ink.... The illustrations in the ancient Ink Recipes show us ink making's long history.

Pound it 30,000 times

Ink making is a complicated process. One must boil the glue, then add the pine soot, musk and camphor, mixing it until it becomes a soft mass, all the while keeping an eye on the time. If the mixture is heated for too long, too much water will evaporate and the ingredients will bind and harden.

"Blending the pine soot with the glue is the most difficult part," says Chen. "The pine soot is very light. The steam carries it into the air the whole time you are mixing it, so you have to work in a tightly sealed room. Working in the heat and steam like that, I always come out drenched in sweat, and coal-black from head to foot. The soot is so black it glistens, and coats even the inside of my nose and the underside of my nails."

Chen spreads fingers stained black by years of making ink and says he has to use two tubs of water to bathe-one to get the ink off and another to get himself clean.

Traditionally, making good ink requires that one "pound it 30,000 times" because "the more it's ground, the better the ink." Rather than use a heavy pestle to pound it by hand, modern ink makers instead use a mechanically driven roller.

A freshly made mass of ink is as black as night, scalding hot and very sticky. The ink is turned and pressed repeatedly by the roller, causing friction and more heat, which evaporates some of the excess moisture. Once the mass has been worked seven or eight times, Chen gets out his mallet.

"The point of using the mallet," explains Chen, "is to work out any cracks or air bubbles in the ink. This makes it denser and more compact, and less inclined to stick to your hands. Beating it carefully also softens it-it won't break even if you stretch it and bend it back and forth." Chen holds his five-kilogram steel mallet in both hands, pounding a mass of ink fresh out of the roller with a good deal of force. In just a few minutes, his shirt is soaked and heavy drops of sweat are falling from his forehead to the floor.

After wrapping up the still hot but now softened ink to maintain its temperature, he begins pinching off pieces, weighing them to ensure that he has the proper amount before rolling them into long cylinders with his hands.

Getting the soot, removing impurities, measuring and grinding the ingredients, mixing the ink.... The illustrations in the ancient Ink Recipes show us ink making's long history.

The cost of doing business

Once the ink has been formed into lengths that are free of cracks and joints, those lengths must be pressed and shaped in a mold. Wooden molds play a crucial role in producing aesthetically pleasing ink sticks. The best are made from pomegranate, a fine-grained, sturdy wood that can be carved with delicate, vivid patterns without splitting. Not only do the patterns wear well, but the wood itself also holds up well to the repeated forceful tapping needed to break the molds open.

Since he established his shop, Chen has been through four or five hundred molds. "Some wore out," he says. "Others had patterns or names on them that the market didn't respond well to, so I stopped using them." These days, Chen has about 140 different molds on hand.

Chen notes that his hand-carved wooden molds are extremely expensive. "Twenty years ago," he recalls, "a rectangular mold cost NT$20,000, and a more delicate round mold cost more than NT$50,000. In those days, a house cost only NT$200,000 or so. I could have bought any number of houses with the money I've invested in molds!" But Chen's real regret is that with the decline of the ink-making industry and the passing away of Taiwan's last mold-maker, Master Ho, the art of making molds has not been passed on.

Once the lengths of ink have been bound into molds, the ink maker applies his body weight to a "pressing chair" made of long planks to press the ink into shape. The next day, after the ink has cooled, the molds are opened, the ink sticks extracted, and their edges trimmed. The ink is then left to dry in the shade for 25 days or so. "Ink sticks made from natural materials are different from those made of chemical composites," says Chen. "They have to be dried slowly in the shade rather than in the sun or with a fan. This slow drying lets the materials bind well and produces the highest quality ink."

Chen's greatest concern during the shade drying process is rain. "If it rains for several days running," he says, "the water in the sticks can't evaporate properly and they get moldy. If the moisture isn't dealt with, they begin to smell and their shape changes-the whole batch can be ruined."

To preserve the relative dryness of his workspace during the Plum Rains, Chen turns on a fan the moment he discovers any moisture on his ink sticks, and keeps it on until the sun comes out again. He doesn't rest easy until his ink has finished drying.

In Taiwan, the best time of year for making ink runs from the eighth month of the lunar calendar through the second month of the following year, when the weather is relatively cool and there is little rain. The best ink is made in the winter because the ink blocks shrink in the cold, dry quickly, and keep their shape. In the summer, on the other hand, the humidity keeps the glue from drying all the way through and the ink can be deformed. Once the ink sticks are completely dry, they have to be smoothed and regularized. But the work isn't finished until a few words have been painted on in gold ink or an image has been added.

Pomegranate wood makes the best molds for ink sticks. Sadly, there is no one left in Taiwan with the skills to make the extremely expensive hand-carved molds.

The golden age of ink making

By a stroke of good fortune, in 1975, one year after Chen had established his Ta-yu Ink Factory, the Ministry of Education added the study of calligraphy to the standard educational curriculum. With all of the nation's primary-school students now grinding ink to practice calligraphy, the hand-made inks that had previously only been purchased by painters and calligraphers became a must-have item for schoolchildren. In addition, tourism was liberalized at around the same time, leading to rapid growth in the number of Japanese tourists visiting Taiwan. The study of calligraphy was booming in Japan at that time, and traditional hand-made ink sticks were very popular with Japanese tourists.

This explosion in demand coupled with the limited number of ink makers in Taiwan left Chen with more customers than product. He had to train six ink makers, hire six workers for his factory, and work around the clock to fill all his orders. Tight supplies of hand-made inks led to the appearance of low-quality chemical inks on the market. Businesspeople soon realized that students didn't enjoy taking the time to grind their ink, and began offering bottled liquid inks.

"Chemical ink sticks are made with artificial pine soot," says Chen. "The soot itself is coarse and heavy, and the inks aren't dark. They even make a crunching noise when you grind them. The artificial soot and preservatives in liquid ink, on the other hand, not only give you a lifeless black, but also damage your brush. And works created with them just don't last-the color always begins to deteriorate after just a couple of years." Chen laments that this unprecedented effort to teach calligraphy was so superficial, and failed to take the cultivation of the individual as its foundation.

Even so, the educational system's new interest in calligraphy, rising consumer demand spurred by the booming economy, and growth in tourism conspired to bring about a decade of prosperity for ink makers. During this period, the Ta-yu Ink Factory became the nation's largest supplier of low-priced inks for students while also helping a number of domestic brush makers get started OEMing ink sticks. In those days, Taiwan's best known ink sticks were "Treasure Island," "Ancient Plum," and "Golden Dragon," all produced by Ta-yu.

The tourists who visited ink factories in those days were also very enthusiastic. One Japanese visitor, on discovering the unique properties of Chen's hand-made inks, invited Chen to Japan to teach his techniques. The man offered generous terms and tried any number of approaches to persuade Chen, but Chen was unwilling to have the tricks of his trade become known abroad and refused the man's every offer.

Literati treasure fine inks, but few are aware of the sweat and tears that go into its manufacture.

Cross-strait competition

After Taiwan began liberalizing travel to the Chinese mainland in 1988, mainland ink makers started making the most of their price advantage in the Taiwan market. This was a heavy blow to Taiwan's manufacturers of hand-made inks. The young masters of the trade Chen and others had worked so hard to train were forced to move into other fields to make a living. Meanwhile, the old masters aged and retired, shutting down their factories, the oldest names in the hand-made ink business, as they did so. These master craftsmen became like actors without a stage-the lights were turned out, the applause faded, and the performers themselves filed out of the building. Only Chen soldiered on, battered but not defeated, delivering the industry's final soliloquy to a silent house.

After a careful study of the inks produced in the mainland, Chen came to the conclusion that the only way to survive his predicament was to improve the quality of his inks still further, widening the gap between his products and those of his competitors. He demanded materials of still higher quality and added valuable traditional Chinese medicines to his inks to make them even more fragrant. Using these fine ingredients and his consummate ink-making skills, Chen produced hand-made Taiwanese ink sticks of outstanding quality, thereby regaining the upper hand in an ink-stick market where uneven quality had been a byword.

In addition to the normal rectangular ink sticks, Chen also began making columnar ink sticks to the size specifications of individual calligraphers. These rounded, shiny-smooth, perfectly straight sticks are shaped entirely by hand in what is an exacting and time-consuming process. In addition, Chen had to come up with a way to hang them in brown packing paper while drying so that they would keep their shape in spite of being cast without the benefit of a form. (Chen has even made the world's largest hand-made ink stick, a 35-centimeter-long monster weighing 1.2 kilograms, just to challenge himself.) Chen's unique round sticks are ergonomic delights much beloved by calligraphers and painters, and draw customers from as far away as Japan.

Getting the soot, removing impurities, measuring and grinding the ingredients, mixing the ink.... The illustrations in the ancient Ink Recipes show us ink making's long history.

Hoping for an apprentice

After nearly half a century in the company of ink, Chen believes that those who use good ink must also have a good grasp of how to grind it. Both the force and the speed with which one grinds an ink stick affect the quality of the ink produced. Using too little pressure and too slow a motion not only wastes time, but also results in an uneven mix of ink and water-the color tends to float atop the water. Grinding with too much force or too hurriedly can result in an ink that is too thick and creates bubbles. The black loses its luster, and the brush often picks up bits and pieces of the ink stick.

To correctly grind ink, "You press down on the end of the ink stick and push it forward," says Chen, "and you have to moderate the amount of force you apply. As you move the stick back and forth, the musk and camphor in it release their scent, clearing your mind and restoring your energy."

By slowly grinding your ink before starting to work, you focus your thoughts. This ritual allows your thoughts to come gushing forth when you actually begin to work.

Chen's great regret is the lack of anyone to whom to pass on his skills. Although he has been approached several times by potential students, all have given up after only a few days of the hard work and inky workspace that go with the territory. "Today's young people," says Chen, "have no desire for hard work and just can't stand it. They study for a few days, then run off."

Even his own son, who studied by his side for a number of years, has little interest in carrying on the family trade.

When urban planning requirements forced Ta-yu to relocate in 2001, Chen, then nearing 60, considered shutting up shop and retiring. However, the encouragement he received from his friends in the arts community, who reminded him that he was the only ink maker in Taiwan, and his own sense that he should pass on his knowledge, led him to relocate the factory to its current location on Sanchung's Sanho Road.

These days, the semi-retired Chen frequently accepts government invitations to give ink-making demonstrations intended to introduce more people to this soon-to-be-lost art. Since most Taiwanese have some experience with grinding ink and writing calligraphy, yet know nothing of how ink is made nor how to judge its quality, Chen has also made his factory available for tours, personally demonstrating the manufacturing process to each visitor and telling them something of ink "culture." His purpose is to help people better understand ink and to bring them into closer contact with it, in the hope that the "black art" of ink making will be passed on.

Ta-yu Ink Factory allows group visits by appointment

Tel.: (02) 2972-5814, 2973-1566

Address: No. 13, Alley 47, Sanho Rd. Sec. 3, Sanchung, Taipei County

Online: http://203.69.163.202/du/index.htm

There's more to a fine ink than just high-quality ingredients and careful attention to the manufacturing process. Delicate etchings are also required to add to their aesthetic appeal.

Getting the soot, removing impurities, measuring and grinding the ingredients, mixing the ink.... The illustrations in the ancient Ink Recipes show us ink making's long history.

Getting the soot, removing impurities, measuring and grinding the ingredients, mixing the ink.... The illustrations in the ancient Ink Recipes show us ink making's long history.

Such perfectly smooth, round and arrow-straight hand-made ink sticks are an ergonomic delight much beloved by calligraphers.

Getting the soot, removing impurities, measuring and grinding the ingredients, mixing the ink.... The illustrations in the ancient Ink Recipes show us ink making's long history.

Chen runs a just-made batch of ink, still scalding hot and sticky, through his roller to flatten it. The friction created by the rollers generates additional heat that evaporates excess moisture from the ink.