Masterpiece of Chinese Genre Painting

There is a unique genre in traditional Chinese painting, in which artists would use painstaking detail to pinpoint everyday life in a certain place at a certain point of history. It provides a compelling insight into the forgotten lives of China's past. Suzhou's Golden Age, a panorama of the city of Suzhou, was painted over a period of 24 years by the Qing Dynasty painter Xu Yang. He worked on a horizontal scroll that stretches an astonishing 12.25 meters. As the scroll unrolls, the viewer is spirited from the tree-covered mountains and fields of the city's periphery to the shop-lined streets, palatial courtyards, crowded waterways and majestic Taoist temples of this beautiful southern city. This book includes two volumes. One volume presents the entire painting using the traditional Chinese parallel folding technique that allows the reader either to flip through the plates like the pages of a book, or to unfold it into a single twelve meter span to take in the entire painting at once. The other volume delves deeply into this painting's historical background, including the artist's creative inspiration and detailed information on the stories incorporated in the painting.