The Life of Old Wutou

Wu Shoupu was born in 1933, and came from a family of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in Guipu Village, deep in the northern Anhui plain. My grandfather, Duke Huairen, hung a pot to help the world, and his family had several generations of handwritten medical classics in his collection. As a child, he grew up surrounded by the fragrance of medicine and the rhyme of ink. He was gifted and intelligent. He began to be literate at a very young age and could memorize many Chinese medicine formulas and poems. He thought that his life would be stable. However, times changed dramatically and ancestral medical books disappeared in the war. As his loved ones died one after another, the family fortune collapsed. Shoupu went south to work. At Jiangcheng Wharf, he met noble people with his good calligraphy and switched from being a coolie carrying bags to keeping accounts in the accounting room. When leaving, he gave a piece of calligraphy to his close friend. This piece of calligraphy became a foreshadowing that shocked the calligraphy world decades later. After returning home, he took on the family's livelihood. After farming, he made a living by picking up rags. His feet measured a radius of hundreds of miles, and his back was bent day by day. He used the change he collected from scavenging to support his younger siblings in their studies. The children he raised after his marriage were all talented and well-educated, and they were nicknamed the "King of Rags" by his neighbors. The eldest daughter Zhiwei was extremely talented, but due to an accident by her father, she gave up taking the exam to run the family. A few years later, she married a hero from the same village, and her life path changed forever. In his later years, by chance, the handwriting he sent to the nobles in Jiangcheng was discovered. Those characters that use suffering as ink and character as pen are praised by the calligraphy community as "ink-bone style". From an old man who picked up rags, he became a respected calligrapher. This is a legend written in a lifetime: about a man who lived out the noblest soul in the humblest place. With his bent posture, he lived like a bridge, crossing himself and others!