A Brush Pouch Copied From a 2,000-Year-Old Tomb
This brush had been on Baoputang's mind for a long time before it existed. 行囊笔 — the "travel pouch brush" — pairs a brush with a hollow bamboo case built to hold it, a design borrowed directly from archaeology: in 1975, excavators at Yunmeng Shuihudi, in Hubei, opened Qin-dynasty tomb No. 11 and found three brushes inside, each with a bamboo shaft, alongside a separate bamboo case hollowed out specifically to hold one — a travel kit, more or less, over two thousand years old.
Xu Huarong rebuilt that idea in pure 紫毫 — rabbit hair — a material he's known for separately from his chicken-wolf-hair work. It took five drafts over several months before the proportions, the spring of the hair, the balance of the case, all came together. Once finished, it became a genuine working brush rather than a museum reproduction: used personally to copy out the Thousand Character Classic, the Sacred Teachings preface, and other practice texts, and credited with channeling something of Li Beihai's brushwork in the process. It travels well, too — small enough that it's gone on actual trips and come back with good reports each time.
Production is slow and the runs are small; when it sells out, it can take months before another batch is ready.