Zhang Zeduan’s scroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival

The scroll, painted in ink and colours on silk, is about 25 cm high and more than 5 m long and is viewed from right to left. It opens with fields and villages outside the city, follows the river crowded with fishing boats, ferries and cargo boats to the great Rainbow Bridge — where a boat with its mast not yet lowered is about to strike the bridge while people shout from above and on the bank — and ends among the shops, inns, restaurants and offices around a city gate. Some 814 people appear — peddlers, porters, monks, fortune-tellers, doctors and officials — with 28 boats, 20 carts, 8 sedan chairs and pack animals; many details agree with descriptions of Kaifeng in Song writings, above all the memoir Dongjing meng Hua lu.

Almost nothing is known of the painter. The earliest attribution is a colophon written in 1186, under the Jin, by Zhang Zhu: it calls Zhang Zeduan a Hanlin academician from Dongwu who had come to the capital to study and excelled at ruled-line painting of boats, carts, markets, bridges and streets, and quotes an earlier catalogue that ranked the scroll in the ‘divine’ class. The traditional view dates it to Huizong's reign (1100–1126), before the Jurchens took Kaifeng in 1127. Some scholars argue that it was painted after 1127 as a recollection of the lost capital, and the historian Valerie Hansen has argued that the city is an idealised one rather than Kaifeng; others read Qingming as a season of the solar calendar rather than the festival; and the art historian Richard Barnhart has associated the painter with the Hanlin painters of the 11th century, the reign of Emperor Renzong. Only the colophon of 1186 gives a firm limit.

The scroll passed through imperial and private collections for centuries and inspired hundreds of copies and free versions, among them the Ming painter Qiu Ying's and the Qing court version, finished in 1736 and presented to the Qianlong Emperor in January 1737, now in Taipei. Puyi, the last emperor, took the original with him when he left the Forbidden City; it was recovered after 1945 and is kept in the Palace Museum in Beijing, where it is shown only rarely. It has been called ‘China's Mona Lisa’.