Our Story

It all started with an email from my friend Professor Eric Mazur of Harvard University.   I received the email from him in 2017 about a news on The Guardian in UK that “Cambridge University is considering letting students bring laptop computers to examinations because their handwritings are not legible”.  His message was that he wanted to do the same at Harvard as well!   If students from the world’s top universities are not able to write legibly, we are clearly losing our ability to use pens.  As a pen maker for many years, learning from my twin brother Peter Cheung of Imperial College London, I decided to start a workshop to foster the love and use of pen through pen-making after my retirement.  It is also a craft which is not difficult to learn, and hand-made pens can be very valued and personal gifts for friends and family that money cannot buy.  It is also most fitting for a professor to do that, as pens have been, for many centuries (both in the West and in China), the key instrument for transmitting and sharing knowledge.