One Song scroll packs 814 people into five meters
Zhang Zeduan's Qingming handscroll walks from farm fields into Bianjing's crowded markets along a winding river. Only about 25.5 centimetres tall yet 5.25 meters long, the Northern Song panorama counts 814 humans, 28 boats, and a bridge crisis that later dynasties copied hundreds of times.
The Chinese title literally means Clear Bright Up River Image, and the scroll is usually read as the festival bustle of the capital now called Kaifeng rather than its tomb-sweeping rites. Sometimes nicknamed China's Mona Lisa, it has an oddly shadowy author. When the Jin overran the Northern Song in 1127, many records burned, and the earliest credit to Zhang Zeduan is an inscription of 1186 describing a Hanlin academician from Dongwu who excelled at jiehua pictures of boats, carts, walls and streets.
Unrolled from right to left, the picture opens on fields tended by farmers and herders, then thickens into suburbs selling wine, grain, lanterns, medicine and bows. The Rainbow Bridge is the climax: a boat with its mast only half lowered swings toward the span, spectators shout, and someone at the top lets a rope down to the crew. About twenty women appear in the original, and only those of low rank walk outside without male company.
Later painters could not leave it alone. Zhao Mengfu made a faithful copy under the Yuan. The Ming artist Qiu Ying produced freer versions, one of which reached New York's Metropolitan Museum in 1947; another stretches to 6.7 metres, dresses everyone in Ming fashion, swaps the wooden bridge for a tall stone arch and turns the near-collision into an orderly tow. Suzhou workshops churned out dozens more, often with forged signatures.
The grandest remake, the Qing Court Version, was begun for the Yongzheng Emperor and presented to his successor Qianlong in January 1737. It runs about 11 metres, holds more than 4,000 figures and adds a palace section; it went to Taipei in 1949. The Song original became a favourite of Puyi, the last emperor, who took it with him on leaving the Forbidden City in 1924. Recovered in 1945, it is now shown only briefly because it is so fragile.
Source: Along the River During the Qingming Festival
