“Almost every brick of the city wall carries an inscription,” says Ma Lin, deputy director of Nanjing’s city wall protection center. The inscriptions on the Ming bricks can name the kiln, the craftsmen, the manager and the officials of the prefecture and county who supervised the work.
One Ming brick inscribed for Changsha Prefecture names Chen Fu, the dianshi of a county, as the supervising official, and Leng Rong as the scribe. It is dated the eighth month of the seventh year of Hongwu. One article calls such names “a list of the people responsible for the quality of the work.”