Chinese Invention Tuesdays: Brush

Edited from Fuck Yeah Chinese Myths!:

Meng Tian (蒙恬 Méng Tián) was a general under the first Emperor Qin Shi Huang, and distinguished himself in campaigns against the Xiongnu or Huns. Legend also credits him with inventing the writing brush (毛笔 máobǐ).

The thing is, Meng Tian had to report back to the Emperor a lot, and back then you could only write by carving on bamboo slips. Which sucked, because it took a long time to write anything. So one day, Meng Tian took his sword tassel, dipped it in ink, and wrote on the bamboo. It was so much faster, and after that Meng Tian’s soldiers hunted animals for their fur. They tied the fur ends to bamboo or wooden sticks, and the brush was born.

The story goes on. When the Emperor Qin died, his successor listened to bad rumours about Meng Tian, and ordered for him to be put to death. Meanwhile, Meng Tian had gone hunting and saw two foxes. Normally, he would have killed them and used their fur to make brushes, but this time he decided not to. Later, when he was imprisoned, the two foxes he had spared appeared, and slammed their bodies against the wall again till they died, sacrificing themselves.

Meng Tian knew what he had to do. He made brushes out of the foxes’ tails, and wrote a statement defending himself. Then he killed himself because he was so upset. The message got to the Emperor, who was so moved that he buried Meng Tian with full honour, and asked everyone to make writing brushes like Meng Tian did.

Later on, as we already know, Cai Lun invented paper, and then around 1041 AD a commoner called Bi Sheng (毕昇  Bì Shēng) invented the first movable type printing press, cutting characters into blocks of sticky clay and baking them hard, setting them in an iron plate. So there you have it – from carving on bamboo to printed type, four centuries before the Gutenberg press.