Editor: Images of Tao Yuanming Appreciating Chrysanthemums, like many other traditional historical themes, are often mistaken as a mere ‘flowering-picking’ scene, or, worse, simply a ‘figure painting’. Let’s see an example illustrated by Dr Yibin Ni.

Tao Yuanming (365–427), the paragon of ‘Fields and Gardens poetry’, spent most of his life as a hermit in a cottage in the countryside, reading, drinking wine, and writing poetry in an unmannered style. He had a unique eye for the beauty and serenity of the natural world close at hand.

Often simple and direct, Tao reflected in his poems on the pleasures and difficulties of rural life and his disdain of the officious hierarchy. The essence of Tao as a literary and spiritual figure is usually represented by an image of him appreciating chrysanthemums in a landscape as well as his famous couplet:

‘I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,

Then gaze long at the southern mountain range.’

(采菊东篱下，悠然见南山)

Unfortunately, the image of Tao Yuanming Appreciating Chrysanthemums, like many other traditional historical themes, is often mistaken as a mere ‘flowering-picking’ scene, or, worse, simply a ‘figure painting’, as is found on the label of a Yongzheng famille rose bowl which was in the Exhibition of ‘Palace Museum Collection: the Emperor Yongzheng’ at the Fengxian County Museum in Shanghai, China 2019.