Chinese history is saturated with ink—both in the literal sense and the figurative. It runs through the pages of printed books, the brushstrokes of calligraphy, the patterns of tattoos, the records of dynasties. It is everywhere. But if ink were a person, who would they be? What would they look like? What job would they have, and how would their life unfold?

Many Chinese writers down the centuries have amused themselves by coming up with answers to these questions. They wrote biographies of fictional personified ink characters, recasting this everyday item of stationery as figures as diverse as concubines, Daoist mystics, government ministers, and feudal lords. Drawing on a multitude of zany stories and images from my fieldwork in Anhui's ink-producing regions, this talk asks what these playful portraits tell us about how premodern writers understood the materials that made up their world, and why a society's jokes so often reveal the most about it.