Chapter 721 Competition

The scroll unfurled, releasing a wave of floral fragrance.

When Gu Weijing received the package, besides this Chinese painting scroll, there was also a small piece of wood, black and about the size of a thumbnail, inside the foam-filled storage box.

There’s a saying in the world of collectors: “Paper lasts a thousand, silk lasts eight hundred.”

This means that paper-made collectibles can last a thousand years, while paintings on silk only last about eight hundred before they decay.

The everyday enemies of Chinese painting on rice paper are twofold: moisture and insects.

In their family’s art shop, three heirloom treasures have been passed down through generations.

These are categorized as jade, gold, and wood.

The jade is a set of bamboo brushes as clear as jade, and those jade seals, all of which his grandfather has passed into his hands.

The gold consisted of several gold bars that helped the family survive through repeated turmoil, without starving even in the direst times. These, in Gu Tongxiang’s hands, were completely spent, and Gu Weijing only heard of them, never having seen them since his birth.

The last is the wood, which refers to three small-leaf camphor wood chests.

Camphor wood can be used in medicine with effects such as dispelling wind, dispersing cold, strengthening the heart, and calming spasms. It naturally repels insects and prevents moths, making it most prized among those grown in the deep mountains of Hubei, Anhui, and Badong areas.

It is said to be able to keep out moisture and preserve valuable paintings and calligraphy for hundreds of years, sealing them as if new.

Boxes made of small-leaf camphor are essential treasures in the homes of elegant nobility and great collectors, comparable in prestige to but not as expensive as huanghuali or small-leaf red sandalwood.

During the Ming and Qing dynasties, among ancestral belongings, the most valuable were not the gold bars but those three old, heavy carved chests.

Conversely, in modern times, the price of small-leaf camphor has not been inflated, and there are plenty of trees left, making them easy to exploit and thus cheaper in price.

At worst, buying camphor mothballs online at ten dollars for a hundred pieces, and getting a third bag free with two, yields the same effect.

Those three large chests instead have become merely a memory of the ancestors.

Elders recount that his grandfather’s great-grandfather, hearing colleagues’ talk that Southeast Asia was a bleak, humid place rife with peach blossom miasma and epidemics, promptly sold their family’s two-courtyard quadrangle dwelling in Baishun Alley at Dashilan’s west side before leaving the capital, returning with those three precious chests.

Whenever his grandfather Gu Tongxiang looked at those three pitch-black chests under the bed, thought of their ancestral home under the Imperial City in the old Capital City, and calculated the property prices, he felt it was such a damned loss.

Even if the memories associated with the wooden chests left by the Gu family were not particularly pleasant.

But Gu Weijing and his cousin Gu Lin learned from a young age to help their elders manage and care for various painting and calligraphy artworks.

The ancients spoke of the fragrance of ink.

Objectively speaking, most inks, whether pine soot ink or oil soot ink, Huizhou ink, or Jin ink, have unpleasant smells; some even have a pungent odor.

Paintings stored in camphor chests, after being kept for a long time, when taken out, have a fresh, plant-like scent, full of antiquity and charm.

Lady Tangning’s “Hundred Flowers Painting” has a fragrance immersed on it applied through a similar method.

With some slight differences.

The 21st century might be the era where artists have the highest social status through the ages.

Lady Tangning is a millionaire US dollar great painter. The ancestors of Gu Weijing, as third-class painters, essentially made a living at the Forbidden City Painting Academy by drawing for nobility, situated as lower-middle-class literary figures.

They play at different levels.

When Gu Weijing received the “Hundred Flowers Painting,” he noticed the scent on the scroll wasn’t the usual camphor scent, but fresher and longer-lasting.

That small piece of wood, full of tiny holes like a sponge, emanated a sweet and pure scent, fragrant yet not cloying, rich in layers.

It was as if layers of flowers were blown down by the spring breeze.

The old man fiddled with the small piece of wood for half a day, then carefully put it back, clicking his tongue and praising, saying Elder Cao’s disciple knows how to play, and indeed has money.

“Was a fragrance added in here?” Gu Weijing speculated.

“Fragrance? Hmph, that’s so uncouth. They play with traditional styles; using fragrance — even if you don’t find it embarrassing, they do!”

“Young people, lacking experience. Do you think drawing a couple of pictures makes you a scholarly artist? Elegance, what matters is elegance, and you’ve got a lot to learn from me, your grandfather!”

Then Gu Tongxiang glanced over.

Only after asserting his authority as a grandfather did the old man smugly explain to Gu Weijing.

“If my guess is correct, this should be the legendary insect-infested agarwood.” He pointed at the dark little piece of wood with his fingertip.

Insect-infested agarwood is the pinnacle among agarwood.

Agarwood is a special fragrance formed as the fragrant wood secretes grease to envelop the wounds inflicted by external forces.

It is divided into four types: shengjie, shujie, tuoluo, and insect-infested.

The latter is the most precious, the longest-lasting and sweet, resembling flower fragrance more than wood.

The insects are intelligent.

From two agarwood trees on a piece of land, it will only gnaw the sweetest-smelling one. Different fungal species on agarwood trees, different acidic secretions from insect gnawing, result in fragrance with varying scents.

The Qing Dynasty’s ‘Yashan Chronicles’ says, “Insect-infested ones, with holes eaten by worms, with little fragrance formed, full of clay powder inside, are called insect-mouth powder. Those with dark color are prized. Beauty adorns it, and the scent is as if all flowers are present.”