One page from a woodblock printed book mounted as an album leaf
Credit
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from June and Simon K.C Li, Fong Liu, Mei-Lee Ney, and Anne and Jim Rothenberg, in honor of Steven S. Koblik
Translation of calligraphy: The tangerine’s greenness lingers until the first dampening dew, The persimmon’s redness awaits the arrival of a moistening frost. Only once the garden is adorned in its autumnal garb, Do the texture and the taste of these two become truly superb. On the right, in praise of the tangerine and the persimmon, by Xing Yi, a monk of Hermitage Mountain
Unlike publishers who put several colors on a single carved block to produce color prints, Hu Zhengyan used a technique termed douban 餖版, using multiple blocks. Each color in the composition was printed with a different carved block that was usually small in size, just large enough to accommodate that part of the design. The resulting prints mimicked paintings with merging tonalities of colors and inks, often without outlines.