Shěn Jìsūn 沈繼孫
Early-Míng ink-maker and pǔlù author, fl. Hóngwǔ era. Self-designated his native place as Gūsū 姑蘇 (Sūzhōu). His zì (if Ní Zàn’s identification is correct) was Xuéwēng 學翁. According to Ní Zàn’s 倪瓚 Yúnlín jí poem-preface (“Gift for Mr Shěn, Ink-Seller”), Shěn was a recluse who supported himself by burning ink in the Sūzhōu market: “the smoke is fine and the glue clear; the blackness is like a drop of lacquer; in this age it is hard to come by.”
He received his ink-method orally from a mòshī (ink-master) of Sānqú 三衢 (in Zhèjiāng) — who taught him to abandon the over-medicated formulas of the SòngYuán mòpǔ tradition and to use only glue plus fine-soot, well-pounded, with no additional drugs (the result, says the master, will be “as black as a young child’s eye-pupil”). He later supplemented this with secret ink-formulas from a Buddhist monk. His one surviving work, the Mòfǎ jíyào 墨法集要 (KR3i0013) of Hóngwǔwùyín (1398) — twenty-one illustrated procedures from oil-soaking through ink-testing — is the most detailed surviving record of the late-fourteenth-century oil-soot ink-making method. His self-preface to that work, dated Hóngwǔwùyín lìchūn (early spring 1398), is the principal biographical document; otherwise his life is undocumented.