Zhang Zeduan
The painter behind the Qingming scroll.
Zhang Zeduan is known for a single work: the scroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival, more than five metres long, which shows life in Kaifeng in the minutest detail.
Zhang Zeduan lived c. 1085–1145, but almost everything we know about him comes from a short colophon on his famous scroll, written in 1186 by a man named Zhang Zhu. It states that he came from Dongwu in present-day Shandong, that he studied in the capital Kaifeng and that he was particularly skilled at painting boats, carts, bridges and buildings with meticulous lines.
His only securely attributed work is Along the River During the Qingming Festival, in the Palace Museum in Beijing. It is a handscroll in ink and light colour on silk, just over five metres long and only about 25 centimetres high. It is meant to be unrolled section by section, from right to left, so that the viewer makes a journey through the picture.
The journey begins in the countryside, follows the river towards the city and ends at the city gate and the streets inside. The picture contains more than 800 people: merchants, porters, monks, sailors, doctors and fortune-tellers. The high point is a large wooden bridge where a boat is about to collide, while people on the bridge shout and point. Everything is depicted with great precision, and the scroll is an invaluable source for what life in a large Chinese city looked like almost a thousand years ago. Scholars disagree about whether the picture really depicts Kaifeng and whether it shows the Qingming festival in spring.
The scroll has been copied and imitated countless times, including by Qiu Ying in the Ming period and by court painters under the Qing. The original is so fragile that it is rarely shown, and when it is, long queues form. It is regarded as one of China's most beloved art treasures.