One of China’s most famous and priceless paintings, “Along the River During the Qingming Festival” (qingming shanghe tu 清明上河图) is now on display at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. The painting is on loan from the Beijing government as part of the celebration for the tenth anniversary of Hong Kong’s return.
The NYT has a great article neatly summarizing the sometimes wild history of the painting:
“Qingming Festival” has been famous since the 14th century, when forgeries began to circulate, said Tang Hing-sun, an assistant curator of the Hong Kong Museum of Art who helped organize the exhibition here.
Forgers could pass off their copies as the original partly because the original was repeatedly stolen or misappropriated from the imperial collection, starting as early as the 1340s. It kept showing up in the hands of wealthy, influential families, from whom emperors repeatedly recovered it when they confiscated estates during disputes.
Qiu Ying, a 16th-century artist, established a reputation for painting beautiful copies of “Qingming Festival,” prompting forgers even to begin producing forgeries of his copies.
The Nationalists moved the cream of the imperial collection to Taiwan shortly before losing the civil war to the