Welcome, fellow traveller of the ink-and-brush web

You have found the personal shrine of a very small obsession: the carpenter from Xiangtan who picked up a brush in his late twenties and became, by the end of a very long life, the most reproduced painter China had ever seen. This page exists because his shrimp deserve a website, and the 1998 web is the only web that would let them have one properly.

Qi Baishi never went to art academy. He carved furniture, then learned to paint from local masters and from looking very hard at actual shrimp in an actual bowl of water on his actual desk. Forty years later museums in Beijing built whole rooms around what came out of that bowl. Poke around — there is a life story, a gallery of his most famous subjects described in words instead of pixels, a page on his painting philosophy, a guestbook you are warmly invited to sign, and some further reading for the real museums that hold the real paintings.

You are visitor number 002686 visitor number 002686 since this shrine opened.