A hundred miles north of Wuyuan there is a village called Hongguan, also an old town famed for producing Huizhou ink. In history it won the praise, “Unmatched gateway between Wu and Chu, first pass on the ancient Hui-Rao road.” I do not know the origin of the village’s name, Hongguan, but I had heard that night rainbows often appeared there after dark, and this made me intensely curious. A night rainbow is simply a rainbow that appears at night. If the moonlight is bright enough and the air contains suitable clouds and raindrops, a rainbow may form. Since moonlight is after all not as strong as sunlight, night rainbows are generally very dim, and among the common people are called white rainbows. China already had ancient verses praising rainbows, such as “Last night the Jade Emperor’s carriage set forth, and across ten thousand miles of sky a painted bridge was raised,” and the Book of Wei also contains records of observed night rainbows.
Yet when I arrived in Hongguan, I began to doubt the rumors, for judging from the local terrain and surroundings it would be difficult for the weather here to produce clear nights with sufficient clouds and rain. And yet that very night more than a dozen bright white rainbows suddenly rose above the village, red on the outer edge and blue-green within. Several of them even carried faint and elegant secondary bows. These white rainbows did not hang slantwise across the sky. They all looked as though they were flying out from people’s windows, so that the whole village seemed wrapped in a net of rainbows, brilliant beyond measure. The next day, after some inquiries, the local people told me that this was just the season for trading Huizhou ink, but whenever I mentioned the night rainbows they all became evasive and unwilling to answer.
Almost every household from which a night rainbow had flown the previous evening turned out to be a Huizhou-ink merchant’s home. I claimed to be a Shanxi merchant buying ink and, relying on memory, visited them one by one. Most of them cut the conversation short the moment I asked about the night rainbows, then politely poured me tea and showed me out. It was not until I reached a small shop run by outsiders that someone finally loosened his tongue, after seeing me generously buy two cakes of superior Huizhou ink. He said that he had married into Hongguan in his youth and inherited his father-in-law’s business, and so did not share the same scruples as the local people. According to him, the so-called night rainbow was not a real white rainbow at all, but an extremely rare kind of inkstone known as the rainbow inkstone. The people of Hongguan were all kin to one another, descended from merchants who in earlier times had traveled back and forth across the Qinling Mountains trading in Huizhou ink and Duan inkstones. Later they unearthed a rare rainbow stone, and from then on ceased their long journeys, conducting the Huizhou-ink trade only in the village. In the late Qing, that rainbow stone was cut into several pieces and made into inkstones preserved among the various family branches. Each year during trading season, when Huizhou ink was ground on a rainbow inkstone, it gave off a seven-colored sheen. Used in calligraphy, the color came out dark yet lustrous; used in painting, it was rich without cloying, pale without turning ashen, and beautifully layered. Among calligraphers and painters it was regarded as a treasure of the highest order.
I pressed him further, asking what connection this had to the night rainbows in the sky, but he only smiled and said nothing more. Fortunately, at the end he still let me glimpse the true form of a rainbow inkstone. Because he came from an outside branch, the one handed down to him was only a very small piece. Its color was milky, ringed with cloudy circular flaws, and its inkstone eye shone brightly. One glance was enough to tell that it possessed a first-rate “living eye.”
When I returned to Pijing, I spoke of the matter to a friend and praised the marvel of the rainbow inkstone. Unexpectedly, my friend laughed and said this was simply a trick Hongguan people had long been fond of, casting rainbow-colored light and shadow at night in order to raise the price. “If you don’t believe it,” he said, “go and look through the history of Huizhou-ink trading. Ordinary Hongguan ink in earlier years cost one tenth of what it does now, yet the quality was better than even the most expensive ink today. As for the rumors of night rainbows, they’ve only been popular for a few years at most. No one ever heard of them before that. I suppose that too must be one of the blessings of high technology.”
ps1: at last, brush, ink, paper, and inkstone are complete. ps2: the previous entry was actually on October 25. I really ought to keep my distance from the Mo-ist atmosphere.