Qiao Ming reached out his right hand to accept the badger-hair brush from Yan Zhiqiu. The brush was a masterpiece of royal craftsmanship, built during the middle epoch of the Yan-Luo Dynasty. Its shaft was carved from mottled brown bamboo cured in stone oil for thirty years, balanced with three drachms of lead shot hidden within the bronze metal ring, and tipped with seventy selected bristles taken from the winter pelts of northern badger. It possessed the ideal combination of flexibility and pulling spring, capable of holding an ounce of thick, sticky pigment while maintaining a needle-sharp point.
The brush had been built to survive decades of nonstop scribal work. The badger hair had been harvested from animals taken in the high northern steppes during the midwinter solstice. Just then, the fur developed its maximum pulling thickness and water-resistant wool-grease coating. Each hair had been inspected individually by royal brush-makers under magnifying lenses, rejecting any bristle with split ends, crooked shafts, or brittle cuticles. The hairs were arranged in five nested rings around a central core of stiff horsehair, bound together with silk thread and set into the bronze metal ring using melted pine pitch mixed with powdered lead oxide.
