富春山居图

Huang Gongwang made this long ink handscroll of the Fuchun river country in his eighties, finishing it around 1350, and it became one of the most admired landscapes in all of Chinese painting. Three centuries later it nearly ceased to exist. A collector named Wu Hongyu loved it so much that on his deathbed in 1650 he ordered it burned so he could take it with him. The scroll was already in the flames when his nephew snatched it out and threw a different scroll in to hide the rescue. It survived, but scorched and broken into two lengths. The larger part is here in Taipei, at the National Palace Museum. The smaller opening section is across the strait, in a museum in Hangzhou.