Along the River During the Qingming Festival

A handscroll unrolling from quiet countryside through a river port to the crowded gate of the capital, carrying more than eight hundred figures, along with boats, shops, bridges and animals — including a barge crew struggling to lower a mast beneath the great wooden Rainbow Bridge. Zhang Zeduan painted it in the early twelfth century at the end of the Northern Song, and it has been copied, forged and imitated for nine hundred years. The original is in the Palace Museum in Beijing, exhibited so rarely that its showings draw queues of hours; in China it occupies roughly the position the Mona Lisa holds in the West.