Trial by Fire

How one scroll became two, in 1650

By the fall of the Ming dynasty the scroll belonged to a collector named Wu Hongyu, who loved it the way people love very few possessions: he kept it by his bed, ate with it near him, and carried it with him barefoot when he fled the Manchu conquest. On his deathbed in 1650 he gave one last instruction — burn the scroll, so that it could travel into the afterlife with him.

His nephew, tasked with the burning, quietly substituted a different painting once his uncle’s attention had gone, and pulled the real scroll back out of the flames. He was fast, but not fast enough: the fire had already caught, and by the time it was safe the scroll had torn and burned through in the middle.

Two pieces, two museums

What survived the fire came apart at the seam the burning had made. The shorter opening section, just 51.4 centimetres long, was re-mounted on its own and became known as The Remaining Mountain — after passing through several more private collections, it reached the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou in 1956. The much longer remainder became The Master Wuyong Scroll, named for the friend Huang Gongwang had painted it for, and eventually travelled to Taiwan with the National Palace Museum’s collection, where it remains today.

For more than 360 years the two pieces of one painting sat in different museums, on different sides of the Taiwan Strait, each the surviving fragment of a single afternoon’s near-catastrophe. They were finally shown together — the whole river, reunited — for one exhibition at the National Palace Museum in Taipei in 2011.

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