Along the River During the Qingming Festival (Qing court version)
Chen Mei, Sun Hu, Jin Kun, Dai Hong and Cheng Zhidao (active early eighteenth century) · 1736, Qing dynasty
More than eleven metres of silk unroll along a case, and on them a whole city goes about its business. Boats crowd under a great arched bridge, porters shoulder loads through a market, shopkeepers lean from doorways, a wedding procession winds through the streets, acrobats perform, children play, and at the far end the imperial palace opens its gardens. Thousands of figures, each a few centimetres tall, fill a panorama that moves from countryside to city walls to palace, as if the viewer were walking beside the river on a spring day.
The original Along the River was painted by Zhang Zeduan in the twelfth century and is in Beijing. This version was made at the Qing court in seventeen thirty six by five painters working together for the Qianlong Emperor, and it is far longer, brighter and more detailed than the Song original. Colours are strong, buildings are drawn with the western perspective that Jesuit painters had brought to the court, and the city is not the old Song capital but a dream of an ideal Chinese town, complete with theatre, ferry, shipyard and a fortress gate. Look for the crowded rainbow bridge where a boat is struggling to lower its mast, for the shop signs, and for the palace with its lake and pavilions at the end.
The scroll was one of the emperor's favourite possessions and carries his seals and poem. It came to Taiwan with the palace collection and appears in the painting galleries in rotation, sometimes fully unrolled, sometimes only in part. Because it rewards close looking, the museum provides magnified reproductions and an animated version, but nothing replaces walking the length of the case slowly from right to left, the direction in which it was meant to be read.
Did You Know? The Qing painters added a European style perspective learned from Jesuit missionaries at the imperial court, so the buildings recede in a way the Song original never does.
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