In ancient times, the Han people used pine tobacco to make ink, the scale was not large, and graphite was still used. Cao Cao built the Tongque Terrace, the Golden Tiger Terrace, and the Bingjing Platform in Yecheng. And a large amount of graphite is stored in the ice well platform.

Lu Shilong once got Cao Cao to hide hundreds of thousands of catties of ink, and sent two snails of ink to his brother Lu Ji. Snail is a metrological name for ink. In the Southern Dynasties, there is ink in the shape of a spiral. There are also a variety of measurement names for ink, including pills, pieces, snails, etc., and later there are quantities, wats, pings, ingots, blocks, etc.

Cao Cao's surviving inscription of the word "Gunxue" has a surging trend, and I don't know whether the original manuscript is written by graphite. Lu Ji's authentic works include "Pingfu Post", the old rain is pouring, dry, old and spicy, vast, ancient, entangled and distorted, full of desolate taste, and the ink marks are poignant echoes. It is said that it is pine smoke ink.

Wei Dan, a calligrapher in the Cao Wei period, was the first and most detailed producer of pine smoke ink. The ink made by Wei Dan is like a stone for a hundred years, and a little bit is like lacquer. Later generations called him the inventor of ink and respected him as the ancestor of ink making. "Qi Min Yaoshu" recorded Wei Dan's "Hemo Law" in detail:

First of all, you need pure cigarettes, pound them, and then sift them in a jar with fine silk to sift out grass clippings, fine sand, dust, etc. Because the pine smoke is very light and fine, it cannot be left open, so as not to fly away.

For each pound of ink cigarettes, use five taels of the best glue and soak them in the ash juice. The ash bark is ash bark, the tree is like sandalwood, the bark is soaked in water to be turquoise, and the writing paper is used as a stain color, which can dilute the glue and make the color of the ink better. One tael of cinnabar, one tael of musk, sift finely, take five egg whites, mix thoroughly.

Put it in an iron mortar and pound 30,000 pestles, the more pestles, the better. The season of Hemo, don't be too warm, too cold, too warm, it will be rotten and smelly. It's too cold, it's soft and hard to dry, and it will shatter when you see the wind and the sun. The weight of each spindle should not exceed three or two taels. It's better to make it smaller than overdone.

Wei Dan said: "The great trick of ink is like this." This also became a basic rule followed by later generations of ink workers.

Thinking of this, Lan Eucalyptus watched the ink in the box being worn to the point that it was about to run out, so he decided to go to Hongcun in Huangshan, Anhui Province to buy some, and heard that the Huimo there was authentic.

Hongcun Town, formerly known as Hongcun and Qixia Town, is a town under the jurisdiction of Yixian County, Huangshan City, Anhui Province, located in the northeast of Yixian County. Hongcun is known as "the village in the painting", the spring dawn of the South Lake, the recitation of the academy, the wind and lotus of the moon marsh, the cow intestine of the water in Shenzhen, the reflection of Shuangxi and the ancient trees in front of the pavilion.

Legend has it that the ancestors of the Hongcun people once lived in the basket of the road to open the mountains and forests. After repeated fires and relocation, they finally found a place to live and work in peace and contentment similar to the last words of their ancestors at the foot of Leigang Mountain: a clear spring that never dries up, surrounded by two rivers, east and west.

In the dreams of our ancestors, the ox is a symbol of wealth, and water is a guarantee of blessing for future generations. To this end, Hu Chongniang, the female leader of the family, based on the interpretation of the ancestors' dreams, planned the newly built village as a cow-shaped village: chiseled a clear spring as a pond, diverted the water of the West River as a supplement, expanded into a "moon marsh", became an imaginary "cow's stomach", and through two water outlets, built a vertical and horizontal interweaving, a total of more than 1,300 meters long Shangshui Zhen and Xiashui Zhen, leading to every household in the village. Shuizhen is also known as "cow intestine", and after the water of Shuizhen is used, all of it gathers into the South Lake, which is called "tripe" in the south of the village.

Walking along the edge of the South Lake, the blue eucalyptus saw that the wood, brick and stone carvings of various buildings are delicate and exquisite, most of the streets and alleys in the village are built by the water, and the houses are also arranged around the moon marsh, and the bustling street market is passed through the two streets.