Along the River During the Qingming Festival (Zhang Zeduan)

A city wakes up and goes to work. Zhang Zeduan’s handscroll follows the traffic from a quiet suburb to the crowded docks of Bianjing, the Song capital, and never looks back.

The scroll runs nearly 5.3 metres and packs in more than 800 figures, every one of them busy. Boats knot at the bridge; shops spill into the street; an empire shows itself as commerce, not ceremony. Zhang Zeduan painted it in the late Northern Song, probably for an emperor who wanted to see his capital without the flattery.

No other Song painting shows a city this unposed. Later courts copied it for five centuries because it was both a document and a wonder. The original is in the Palace Museum; most of what the world remembers of Bianjing comes from this one roll of silk.

Image © The Palace Museum. View the original in the Palace Museum collection.