In Up the River of Time: The Chinese Painting Tradition of Qingming Shanghe, Cheng-hua Wang examines the history and legacy of the famous Northern Song handscroll Qingming shanghe (translated in this book as “Up the river during Qingming”), attributed to the otherwise unknown Zhang Zeduan. Wang is especially interested in the hundreds of imitations and forgeries of the handscroll that commercial workshops produced during the late Ming (ca. 1550s–1644) and the High Qing (ca. 1680s–1795), and that survive in large numbers in museum storerooms worldwide. Because during the Ming and Qing periods very few people ever saw the original painting, and because faithful copies appear to have been almost as rare as the original, the composition existed mainly as an idea, transmitted by rumor and reputation, its composition and meaning encapsulated by the title Qingming shanghe: a lively but orderly cityscape, stretching along a busy waterway.

Wang argues that the painting tradition connected to Qingming shanghe, with its unseen original and its many forgeries and imitations, offers material for an alternative history of Chinese painting, a history that does not lay out a linear narrative of masters and disciples, of a succession of standard subjects, or of an evolution of brush technique, but that instead follows a nonlinear trajectory of “theme.” The theme of Qingming shanghe persisted across 600 years, not only in the original painting but also in its title; in rumors; in real and forged colophons; in alleged copies by the Ming-period painter Qiu Ying (ca. 1494–1552); in alternative versions supposedly produced by Zhang Zeduan’s peers at the Painting Academy under Emperor Huizong; in cheap handscrolls of generic cityscapes put out by workshops and sold for one tael; and in an updated version using European-style perspective, painted over several years at the courts of the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors. The lore of Qingming shanghe and the many imitations it inspired clearly form a tradition of some kind, Wang argues. Yet this tradition does not fit conventional art-historical narratives, whether late imperial or modern, Chinese or European, because it involves forgeries and imitations of an unseen painting, mostly by unknown painters, circulating in art markets and miscellany stores, and owned by uninformed collectors as well as by the imperial court. Wang shows that the prestigious, highly accomplished version of Qingming shanghe painted at the courts of Yongzheng and Qianlong included elements first introduced by the commercial workshops of the late Ming. Qingming shanghe paintings moreover helped shape visual representations of cityscapes in Edo Japan, entered collections in Joseon Korea, and informed early perceptions of Chinese painting in Europe.

The first chapter of the book, “The Painting,” describes and analyzes the Northern Song handscroll attributed to Zhang Zeduan. Wang characterizes the painting as a polyscenic handscroll that combines renditions of a rural landscape, water transport, and a cityscape, connected by transitional points and integrated into a unified composition. She identifies the waterway as the Bian Canal and the city as the Northern Song capital Kaifeng. Wang rejects arguments that the painting depicts the day of the Qingming festival or the first day of the shipping season, arguing instead that the painting represents an ordinary day and that the painting emphasizes the waterway and its transport rather than the cityscape. Based on the complexity of the polyscenic composition, on technical criteria such as brushwork and skill, on the quality of the silk, and on the political message of the painting, Wang dates this original Qingming shanghe handscroll to the early twelfth century and ascribes it to the court of Emperor Huizong. She interprets the painting as a vision of peace, prosperity, and collective labor, manifested in “an idealized view of Kaifeng and its environs, when water transport along the Bian Canal was paramount to their survival” (55).

The second chapter, “The Aftermath,” argues that after the capture of Emperor Huizong and the loss of Kaifeng in 1127, Qingming shanghe transformed from a singular painting into a “painting theme,” due to its “sociocultural and political significance” (63). Colophons written during the Jin, Yuan, and Ming periods identified a new political message in the painting. Instead of perceiving the painting as a representation of a prosperous, well-governed waterscape, the authors of these colophons saw a capital on the eve of collapse, a living ruin, painted for a corrupt, incompetent emperor. In the late Ming, Zhang Zeduan’s painting itself became associated with ill fate, as rumors and spurious tales blamed the scroll for the misfortunes of its wealthy owners. The painting appears among the confiscated possessions of Yan Song, and some rumors alleged that Wang Shizhen, the son of one of Yan Song’s victims, wrote the novel Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei) to avenge his father by depicting members of the Yan family indulging in lewd, lethal excess during the reign of Emperor Huizong.

In the third chapter, “Perception, Reception, and Re-Creation,” Wang analyzes 21 renditions of the “Qingming shanghe theme” from the late Ming through the High Qing, divided into four categories. The first category centers on the only rendition that bears an authentic signature and a date: a Qingming shanghe scroll painted by Zhao Zhe in 1577. The fourth category consists of handscrolls that Wang dates to the Qing period. The handscrolls in the second and third categories are difficult to date, because they are generic and derivative, produced by workshops, with fake signatures and fake colophons. In spite of being fakes, Wang argues, paintings such as these possessed their own agency. In the absence of an accessible original, for example, literati had difficulty recognizing the products of late-Ming workshops and sometimes mistook them for faithful copies of the Song-period original or identified them as Song-period treatments of the same theme. The painting workshops moreover changed the composition and detail of the original painting. They shifted the emphasis of the composition from water transport to the commercial cityscape and introduced elements from the southeastern landscape, such as a stone arched bridge (instead of the self-supporting wooden bridge at the center of the Song painting) and a mountainous background. Some handscrolls continued the association of Qingming shanghe with the loss of Kaifeng (e.g., by connecting the theme with other lost capitals, such as Hangzhou and Nanjing), but other renditions depicted a generic urban life of consumption and prosperity, in a generic urban setting. Wang argues that these transformations of composition and meaning demonstrate that the phrase Qingming shanghe referred to a theme, rather than to a specific painting.

Chapter Four, “The Rise of City Views,” places the late-Ming Qingming shanghe handscrolls in the context of other late-Ming depictions of cities, city walls, and urban life. It argues that “the city first became a ‘pictorial site’ in the late Ming” (144), joining the established pictorial sites of the imperial court, mountains and water, villages and the countryside, and gardens. During the late Ming, city views focused on scenic spots, urban consumption, and the subjective, individual viewer, rather than on government buildings or political meanings. According to Wang, these late-Ming city views express a new urban consciousness. Chapter Five, “The Allure of Quantity,” inquires into the possible meanings of the sheer number of handscrolls depicting the Qingming shanghe theme. Although most of them carry false signatures and forged colophons, and although some literati connoisseurs mistook them for Song-period paintings, none of the more than a hundred extant handscrolls has an authentic colophon by a Ming or Qing literatus, which suggests that literati may not have owned or valued these paintings. Wang speculates that, instead, the scrolls appealed to lower-end consumers by their lively urban scenery, by their combination of specific and generic elements, and by antiquarian touches such as blue-and-green landscapes in the background. Unlike the Song-period original, the Ming versions of the Qingming shanghe theme include shops that specialize in selling paintings.

Chapter Six, “In Imperial Eyes,” analyzes the Qingming shanghe painting produced at the courts of the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors between 1728 and 1737. Wang calls this 11-meter-long scroll “the last high point of the Qingming theme in its tradition” (199), as well as “a new paradigm of an old theme” (200), characterized by “new artistic and institutional tendencies in Qing court painting” (200–201). She argues that theatricality and spectatorship hold together the form, technique, subject, and theme of the painting. From its more elevated point of view, represented with the aid of European-style perspective, the scroll represents a series of dramatic scenes (their theatricality emphasized by the presence of onlookers), European buildings, and an idealized imperial city populated by women. This representation of the city as a stage had a built counterpart in the imperial park at Yuanmingyuan, where Yongzheng and Qianlong constructed a street with model shops. The imperial scroll moreover included elements from the Qingming shanghe scrolls produced by commercial workshops, notably from a handscroll attributed to Qiu Ying, which Qianlong believed to depict Song-period Kaifeng. The Qing imperial handscroll fits within Qianlong’s politics of art collecting and patronage. His colophon on the painting criticizes the ineptitude of Emperor Huizong, but Qianlong also mimics Huizong’s patronage, to the extent of identifying the painters of the scroll as members of a Painting Academy that did not, in fact, exist at his court. Wang uses Qianlong’s patronage of this scroll to remind readers that the antiquarian canon that Qianlong created included forgeries, and that his claim to authority may have encompassed elements of commercial painting as well as the more prestigious forms of painting.

Chapter Seven, “The Tradition,” argues that during the Song period some titles of landscape paintings became generic, thus creating themes that became traditions. As a consequence, “in the late Northern Song, themes, embracing pictorial intents [huayi 畫意] and painting titles [huati 畫題], assumed a pivotal role in artistic discourse and became the key concept for understanding the meanings of paintings” (245), including of polyscenic handscrolls. Wang justifies her identification of Qingming shanghe as a “theme” by comparing Qingming shanghe to well-known multivalent themes such as Eight Views of XiaoXiang, Rhapsody on the Goddess of the Luo River, and Peach Blossom Spring. Wang concludes that “theme,” like “brushlines and other formal elements … connected and transmitted recognizable and frequently codified pictorial intents and helped develop a cultural constellation surrounding the painting’s content” (250). Unlike formal elements, however, “theme” also “moved to the sociocultural and political realms” (250). The “thematic transmission” (250) of Qingming shanghe remained unique, however, in that it did not rely on literary texts or even on an accessible painting, but depended instead on rumor, misinformation, forgery, and reproduction.

The arguments of Up the River of Time, unfortunately, are difficult to follow and, therefore, difficult to evaluate. First, its introductions announce the topics of the book and the chapters, but do not define their key concepts or summarize their arguments. Because the generic language of those introductions does not prepare the reader for what follows, the introductions are useless, including the entirety of the “Introduction” on pages 1 through 25. The first firm argument appears on page 48 (“This analysis leads to the conclusion that the Qingming painting dates to the early twelfth century, and its provenance is likely traceable back to the Huizong court”). The book does not define its central analytical concept of “theme” until the final chapter, where readers find the laconic observation that “To begin, a few words are necessary to clarify what ‘theme’ means here and how it is different from ‘subject’ and ‘subject matter’” (241).

Second, the habitual deferral of definitions and arguments makes the mode of reasoning in the book inductive rather than deductive. As a result, the arguments and evidence often appear arbitrary and inconsistent. The chapter on city views, for example, cites printed maps of cities to prove that visual representations of urban views were new in the Ming, but its discussion of urban views during the Song period cites only paintings and does not mention the printed maps of cities such as those in Song-period local gazetteers. The deferral of definitions and arguments also results in numerous contradictions and inconsistencies, including in central arguments and in the use of main analytical terms. The introduction to the book, for example, praises Zhang Yanyuan’s (ca. 810s–after 876) refusal of a linear chronology of painting techniques in favor of a nonlinear, overlapping chronology of innovations by great masters, but the first chapter establishes the date of Qingming shanghe by assuming an exact linear progression, precisely coordinated across the Song Empire, of polyscenic composition and brush technique. The concept of “pictorial site” (144 et seq.) in Chapter Four appears as “pictorial institution” (160) in the conclusion to that chapter. Most importantly, the use and usage of “theme” are inconsistent and incoherent. The “theme” of Qingming shanghe encompasses elements that the book also identifies as “themes,” such as “rural, urban, and water transport,” which in turn have their own “associated” themes (51), and “to the city” and “urban delights” (130). Sometimes, “theme” appears to mean “format” or “composition” (e.g., “Qingming shanghe became a painting theme of cityscapes,” 117); at other times, “theme” appears interchangeable with “label” (116), “tradition” (117, and in the subtitle of the book), “schema” (213), “subject matter” (245), and “pictorial intent” (248). As quoted above, moreover, the book argues that “in the late Northern Song, themes … became the key concept for understanding the meanings of paintings” (245), but Wang does not provide a Chinese phrase for this concept. Can “the concept of theme” have “dominated discussions of painting” (248) during the Song if Song critics did not use a specific word or phrase to represent it? As a result of these inconsistencies and contradictions, the argument of the book appears arbitrary and disingenuous, as if it were invented to justify the subject matter of the book. The acknowledgments complain that “shifting academic tides … have rendered the study of painting traditions an almost endangered pursuit” (xv), but the deferral of definitions and arguments, and the resulting inconsistencies and contradictions, suggest rather an unease with academic conventions that shifting tides of method or theory have never changed.

Third, the usage in Up the River of Time is often unidiomatic and sometimes ungrammatical, as several of the quotations above have already illustrated. Readers may feel as though they are walking across a suspension bridge of which many planks are missing and many others are unsound. Some instances of unidiomatic usage are funny (e.g., “the list … is too long to mention,” xvi; “an enthusiastic target,” 86; “these paintings, made from different hands,” 90; “copies could assume its mantle as the torchbearer of the tradition,” 193), but most of them are frustrating, because they blur analytical distinctions and obscure steps in logic that readers must perceive clearly to follow the argument. On pages 52–54, for example, the book alternates between the terms symbol, allegory, icon, and metaphor as though they were synonymous; and the book contains many hundreds of sentences that are so vague as to be meaningless, such as “This book examines the cultural imagining that the name Qingming shanghe could evoke and the artistic, political, and sociocultural realms with which these paintings were associated and helped shape” (1), or “As the production and consumption sites for art, cities were the fountainhead from which these paintings became socially visible” (7), or “in the late Northern Song, a new tendency arose on the artistic landscape, which discussed themes no less than forms and required formal skills to achieve pictorial intents” (248).

In sum, Up the River of Time addresses a number of interesting art-historical themes and historical connections, such as the connection between the Qingming shanghe scrolls and the novel Plum in the Golden Vase, and it gestures toward some plausible arguments. The author, however, has made insufficient effort to make these arguments consistent, convincing, or even intelligible. The exposition is incoherent and the prose often incomprehensible. As a result, the book places the burden of creating meaning and coherence on its readers, but even astute readers will not be able to resolve the inherent inconsistencies and contradictions, and therefore may find their labor poorly rewarded.