Along the River During the Qingming Festival

I now officially have a new favorite painting, and this is it : "Along the River During the Qingming Festival". Goodbye, Starry Night. Zhang Zeduan is my new Van Gogh.

Along the River (as I shall now refer it as, since the title is extremely supercalifragilistic) is a panoramic painting sizing at 24.8 x 528.7 cm. It is super long! The picture I placed there is just a TINY part of the entire painting. Look at this picture of the full sized version and see for yourself what I mean when I say LONG.

The original was created during the Song, but there have been remakes of this painting, most notably, the one from the Ming and Qing Dynasty. The one on the left side is a scene taken from the Song original and the one on the right is from the Qing remake. I really like the Qing remake because it has a bit more life into it, like more color and more action. Of course, nothing beats the original, but this Qing version is also a masterpiece on its own. This remake is at Taiwan and the original one is at Beijing.

This painting depicts life at Kaifeng (the capital then) during the Song Dynasty and supposedly during the the Qingming Festival. But scholars have debated on whether the city depicted was in fact non-existent but merely an idealized one and that the season then was Fall. Nevertheless, its intricacy and excellent execution is still very awe-inspiring.

And speaking of inspiration, the reason why I love this painting so much is because the first time I saw it, it suddenly gave me a lot of wonderful ideas. It's never easy to find inspiration (though they say that inspiration can be found anywhere) and this is one of those rare things that really inspired me.

I first saw this painting in my Asian History Class with Ms. Lailani Gotao (I love her class very much, it's so fun! If given a choice, you HAVE to pick her class). Her class is what I look forward to every Tuesday and Thursday (despite the shitty time 12-1:30?! I haven't eaten lunch yet!). As good friends know, I used to love Europe very much and thought that they were just the greatest. I love reading about kings and queens, the French, watching those movies with huge poofy dresses, etc. I got really sad when I couldn't get Western History for this semester. But truthfully, I'm so glad I got into Asian History. I have a deeper appreciation now of my Asian heritage and now I want to go back to China! I can't believe I missed so much when I visited China around.... 3 years ago, I think.

I have changed No. 26 on my list of 70 Things to Do Before I Die, from Visiting Starry Night by Van Gogh to visting the original "Along the River" painting at Beijing! Seeing the Qing in Taiwan will be just as good too!