Four dimensions

TV documentary sheds light on tools of scholarship in ancient China. Xu Fan reports.

Few people may connect the writing brush, a vital tool of ancient Chinese calligraphy, to the whiskers of a mouse.

But a hit TV documentary, The Four Treasures of Chinese Study, shows a veteran brush-maker obtaining a few such mice-whisker strands to make a pen's head and accounts of ancient calligraphers using such pens to write their masterpieces.