Rouleau des admonestations

The words on this scroll are older than the painting. Around the year 292 an official named Zhang Hua wrote a set of admonitions meant to correct the behavior of an overbearing empress and to guide the women of the court. A century or so later the painter Gu Kaizhi is said to have illustrated them. What survives here is not his own hand but a careful copy made around the 7th or 8th century, the closest thing we have to a lost original. Nine scenes read from right to left, court ladies at their mirrors and their moral lessons. The Qianlong emperor loved the scroll and had it remounted. It left China in 1900, taken by a British officer during the fighting of the Boxer Uprising, and reached the British Museum three years later.