In mid-September, Regular Mounted Attendant Quan Li left Qiantang to return to Jiankang, passing through Wu Commandery on the way. Quan Li was Wu Commandery's merit assessor, but answered only to the Minister of Works' Office; the commandery governor had no authority to interfere with his duties of seeking out and assessing talent. Still, the governor had to be informed of the talents selected from the commandery's twelve counties, and Quan Li was on good personal terms with Lu Na. Thus, he stayed at the governor's residence for two days, drinking and talking of the beauty of Wu's landscapes and the excellence of its people. Naturally, Chen Caozhi, the young man of humble birth whom he had just elevated to the sixth rank, was an important topic of conversation.
When Lu Na first heard that Quan Li had elevated a fifteen-year-old boy of humble birth to the sixth rank, he rather disapproved. A sixth-rank assessment for someone of humble birth was equivalent to a scion of a great clan receiving the highest possible assessment, the second rank; such decisions demanded the utmost caution. But when he saw the scroll of "Stopping Clouds" that Quan Li produced, written during Chen Caozhi's calligraphy contest with Chu Wenqian, he could not help greatly admiring Chen Caozhi's distinctive running-regular script.
Lu Na was widely recognized as a master calligrapher who had inherited the style of his uncle Lu Ji. Immersed in calligraphy for more than thirty years, he excelled in all four scripts: seal, clerical, regular, and running. His calligraphy was rated second rank, just below the first-ranked Wang Xizhi and Xie An. Yet in the eyes of most people in Jiangzuo, Lu Na's calligraphy was no worse than Wang's or Xie's; his exclusion from the first rank was entirely due to the northern