And the role of the young girl, a little caretaker in the house of the canon, though built out of materials that in cruder hands would quickly betray their spirit and such a restrained gentility of writing ink that, if it is cast at all appropriately, it can hardly fail to dig into an audience's emotions.
12.
Shen used the soot from the smoke of burned petroleum fuel ( �w�l " Sh�y�u ", " rock oil " as Shen called it ) to invent a new, more durable type of writing ink; the Ming Dynasty pharmacologist Li Shizhen ( 1518 1593 ) wrote that Shen's ink was " lustrous like lacquer, and superior to that made from pinewood lamp-black, " or the soot from pinewood.
