A Brush That Took Two Years
鸡狼毫 — chicken-wolf-hair brush — is a minor category within brush-making, but not a new one. It was already in fashion by the Qing dynasty, and traces back further still, to a much older 鸡毫 (chicken-hair) brush tradition with a specific origin story: Song-dynasty scholars Su Dongpo and Huang Tingjian, exiled to remote southern postings with few good materials on hand, wrote some of their surviving calligraphy with cheap local chicken-feather brushes — proof, as one old text put it, that "the writing may be soft, but the brush still cuts clean."
The refined version layers rabbit or other resilient hair at the core for spring, then wraps it in goat hair and chicken feather for softness — a brush good enough for the era's officials and scholars, not just a frontier improvisation.
Xu Huarong, in Wengang, Jiangxi, makes his under the name 古法 — "ancient method" — because he's the recognized intangible-heritage transmitter for this exact technique, passed down through his own family line rather than learned secondhand. He's spent over 40 years at it, starting basic training as a child, and is one of the only people in China still working in chicken-wolf-hair specifically — also locally regarded, unofficially, as without peer in 紫毫 (rabbit-hair) brushes. Both are small brushes, and small brushes are the hardest: Wang Xizhi's old principle, 硬毫为柱，软毫为被 — firm hair at the core, soft hair as the wrap — is easy to state and difficult to execute at this scale without thirty or forty years of practiced hand.
This particular brush — small yellow wolf-tail at the core, a touch of rabbit hair reinforcing it, yellow and white chicken feather layered as the outer wrap — took two years to complete. It's named 小吉, "Little Auspicious," for lack of a better word. Good brushes, in the end, mostly just speak for themselves.