Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains

Fu Chun Shan Ju Tu, painted 1348–1350

This is a handscroll, not a framed picture: a long, continuous roll of paper meant to be unrolled a section at a time on a table, right hand feeding the paper out as the left hand rolls it back up, so that no viewer ever sees more than an arm’s width of it at once. Before the events described on the fire page, the whole thing ran to 691.3 centimetres — nearly seven metres of river valley, painted for Huang Gongwang to give to a Daoist friend he addressed as Wuyong, “Useless,” a self-deprecating name in the old Daoist sense of the word.

What it shows

The scroll follows the Fuchun River south-west of Hangzhou through its seasons and distances — fishermen, a scatter of huts and pavilions, travellers on footpaths, hills receding into mist — rendered almost entirely in dry ink with a technique of layered, repeated brush-texture (cun) rather than outline and wash. Up close it looks unfinished, even scratchy; stood back from, the layering resolves into weather and depth. It rewards exactly the slow, one-section-at-a-time viewing the handscroll format demands.

Painting for no one in particular

Nothing about the scroll was made for a Mongol court audience. Under Yuan rule, the old channel of court patronage that Song-dynasty painters had worked within was largely closed to the Chinese literati, and painting became something scholars did for their own cultivation and for friends who could read the brushwork the way others might read a poem. Huang Gongwang’s few surviving works, this one above all, are the clearest surviving record of what that shift produced.

A famous case of mistaken identity

For over a century, the Qing court owned two scrolls that both claimed to be the missing half of this painting: the real one, and an 18th-century copy known as the Zimingjuan. The Qianlong Emperor, a confident connoisseur, judged the real one a fake on the strength of its “weak brushwork” and lavished his favourite copy with decades of his own inscriptions and poems instead. The mistake stood until 1816, well into his son’s reign — a reminder that even an emperor’s eye can prefer the copy it already loves.

Read on for how the scroll was split in two, or return to the shrine entrance.