The story scene comes from a marvel play Legend of the Jade Hairpin, which is not to be confused with the scene in Romance of the Western Chamber. Read the following article to find out details of the story and how this figural scene is depicted.<...

Have you ever been puzzled by the description of ‘figural paintings’ for Chinese porcelains listed by various museums and auction catalogues? In fact, many Chinese paintings with figures refer to ancient stories and have meanings behind the scenes...

In Chinese porcelain painting, it can be tricky to interpret a round disc in the sky as a sun or a moon. Knowledge of Chinese culture and pun rebuses are the keys to explain the meanings of the motifs and scenes correctly. Here are some examples…<...

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.

This is Scene Four of Act Two of the Chinese classic popular drama Romance of the Western Chamber (西厢记 Xixiang Ji), written by the Yuan playwright Wang Shifu (12...

Tao Yuanming (陶渊明, 365–427), also known as Tao Qian 陶潜, 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 c...

Legend of the Jade Hairpin (Yu Zan Ji 玉簪记) is a Ming-dynasty ‘marvel play’ which was the major drama genre of the time. The play, consisting of thirty-three scenes, was written by Gao Lian (高濂 fl. 1573-1581) around 1580 and remained to be a popular classic for the following three hundred years. It is a Shakespea...

Young scholar Zhang Junrui (张君瑞, also called Zhang Sheng 张生) is the male protagonist in the famous ancient Chinese play, Romance of the Western Chamber (西厢记 Xixiang j...