Xiling Seal Art Society

This guide to Xiling Seal Art Society in Hangzhou opens with Wu Changshuo, who lasted exactly one month as a government magistrate before walking away from the only respectable career open to him. It follows how the poor young calligrapher, unable to afford real seal stone, practiced carving on broken bricks and roof tiles, and how four young epigraphers on Solitary Hill founded a society in 1904 to save the dying craft of stone seal carving. Wu became its first president a decade later, already famous in Shanghai as a painter and calligrapher.