On the Modern Chinese Translation of Petroleum from Shen Kuo's Meng Qian Bi Tan

Yanzhou Yanzhou has an oil. In the past, Gaonu County produced fertile water, which was the meaning of this kind of thing. Oil is produced by the water, mixed with sandstone and spring water, and flows out intermittently. Local residents picked it up with pheasant tail hair and collected it in a crock. This oil is very similar to varnish. It burns like a hemp torch, but smoke billows and all the tents polluted by it turn black. I guess this kind of cigarette can be used, so I tried to sweep its bituminous coal as ink. The luster of ink is like black paint, even loose ink can't compare with it. So I made a lot of them and marked them with words called "Yanchuan Stone Liquid". This kind of ink will be widely popular in the world in the future, since I started making it.

There must be a lot of oil, which is produced underground and endless, unlike pine trees that will run out at a certain time. Nowadays, there are no large areas of pine forests in Shandong. Gradually, most of the mountains where pine trees grow are bald in Taihang Mountain, the junction of Henan, Shaanxi and Hubei, and the south of the Yangtze River. People who make ink probably don't understand the benefits of lampblack.

Soot is also big, often infected with black clothes. My script Yanzhou said: "Snowflakes were flying in air billow Mountain and Balang Mountain in Yichuan County, Shaanxi Province, and immediately I put up a felt tent and learned that people there lived a nomadic life. The clothes are all black, but the winter has not passed, and the oil smoke is more likely to blacken the clothes of pedestrians than the smoke of Luoyang chariots and horses. "