Picking Up the Sesame, Losing the Watermelon (Part Two)

"This really is hard to say!"

After hearing Liu Sizhe, Zhu Dafu shook his head and said, "You should all know how rare Li ink is. It was said that Emperor Taizu of Song once ordered, 'Load the Tinggui ink onto several ships and bring it into the imperial treasury.' Later, the rulers of the Song Dynasty monopolized Li Tinggui ink, making it exclusive to the imperial family. Imperial edicts were written only with this ink."

"At that time, Huizhou had to present 1,000 jin of this ink to the imperial court every year, which made it extremely difficult to find on the market. That was how the saying, 'Gold is easy to obtain, but Li ink is hard to find,' came about. It was said that on the Black Market, a single piece of Li ink sold for ten thousand coins, considerably more than gold. That was why it was also called 'Number one under heaven' or 'Number one ink under heaven.'"

"Unfortunately, most of Li Tinggui's descendants later entered politics. Many became officials, and no one inherited the family business. The classics also contained no detailed records of Li Tinggui's specific methods and techniques for making ink. The only surviving record was a poem about Li Tinggui's method of preserving ink in the Complete Tang Poems, Li Tinggui's Ink Preservation Secret. It was said to have been dictated by Li Tinggui himself."

"Of the pieces that have survived to this day, aside from the piece of Li ink in the Treasure Island Palace Museum, which was supposedly personally kept by Emperor Qianlong and passed down because he cherished it too much to use, Li ink can no longer be found anywhere else. Besides, compared with that piece of Li ink, this ancient ink is simply too new and