Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Fuchun shanju tu)

The scroll is a handscroll in ink on paper that Huang Gongwang began in 1347 and signed off in an inscription dated 1350. Since the fire of 1650 it has been two separately mounted pieces. The long section, known as the Master Wuyong Scroll, measures 33 x 636.9 cm, is made of six joined sheets and belongs to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, which lists it as Gu Hua 001016. The opening fragment, known as the Remaining Mountain, measures 31.8 x 51.4 cm and belongs to the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou. The Taipei museum's own text says the shorter piece is the actual beginning of the painting.

Added together the two pieces come to 688.3 cm. The English Wikipedia article gives 691.3 cm, which does not follow from the museums' figures. In a press report of November 2025 the Zhejiang museum gives about 746 cm for the original length, a figure that must include the part that burned away, although the report does not show how it was reckoned. For what the lost opening looked like the evidence is two copies, not the original. The Taipei museum notes that Shen Zhou's copy of 1487 and the so-called Ziming scroll begin the same way, and takes this to show the front of the original before the fire. Beijing Daily's 2010 account says the burned front showed a city tower and a flat spread of sand where the Fuchun River runs into the Qiantang.

The two pieces have never been joined. In 2011 they lay in one case, each in its own mount, with the fragment's colophons between them, according to the Chinese Wikipedia article. Nothing in the sources read describes any plan to rejoin them physically.

No auction sale of the scroll is recorded anywhere in the sources read. Its known prices come from a pledge, private sales, a court purchase and a state purchase, and they are given below in the units the sources use.

Four titles belong to this record. The long section is the Master Wuyong Scroll (Wuyong shi juan, also called the Wuyong version), named for the Taoist whom the painter's inscription mentions. The fragment is the Remaining Mountain (Shengshan tu). The frontispiece that Wu Hufan wrote for the mount of the fragment reads Fuchun yi jiao, A Corner of Fuchun. The Taipei museum also calls the whole work the Orchid Pavilion of painting, in comparison with Wang Xizhi's Orchid Pavilion Preface.

Two other things carry the same name and are not this scroll. The first is the Ziming Scroll (Ziming juan), 32.9 x 589.2 cm, which the Taipei museum lists as attributed to Huang Gongwang, with an inscription dated autumn 1338 for a recluse called Ziming. It belongs to the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The Palace Museum in Beijing holds a different copy, the one Shen Zhou painted from memory in 1487. The second is a separate painting by Huang, the hanging scroll Fuchun Daling tu (Great Summits of Fuchun) in the Nanjing Museum. The museum's director, Gong Liang, told Xinmin Evening News in 2011 that it was made before the scroll and gave Huang the idea for it.

The two get tangled in Dong Qichang's own writing. He called what he bought in 1596 Fuchun Daling tu, and Shi Wanzhong takes the match between that phrase and Shen Zhou's memory copy as proof that Dong meant the long scroll and not the Nanjing hanging scroll. The Taipei Times, in a wire report of May 2011, retitled the fragment The Broken Mountains, a loose rendering that no museum uses. A. John Hay's 1978 dissertation spells the title Fu-ch'un in Wade-Giles, which is where older English-language literature will be found.

In this record the scroll means the Master Wuyong Scroll and the Remaining Mountain together, and the Ziming Scroll always means the Taipei copy.

The only dated statement by the painter is the inscription at the end of the long section. The Baidu Baike pages print its text, and the English edition renders it in a machine-like style that is used here only as a check on the Chinese. In substance Huang says that in the seventh year of the Zhizheng reign, 1347, he returned to live in the Fuchun mountains with Master Wuyong, and that on idle days in the South Tower he took up the brush. He was so absorbed that he laid out the design at length and filled it in bit by bit. After three or four years it was still incomplete, because he left it in the mountains while he travelled. He now had it back in his luggage and would add to it whenever he had leisure. Wuyong worried that someone might take it by trickery or force and asked him to inscribe the end of the scroll first, so that people would know how hard it had been to make. The inscription is dated to the tenth year, a gengyin year, the day before the Dragon Boat Festival, and written at the Zhizhi Hall of the Xia family at Yunjian, which is Songjiang.

So 1350 dates the inscription, not necessarily the last stroke. The Taipei museum says the painter began in 1347 and finished three to four years later and elsewhere that the work was completed in 1350 when he was 82 by Chinese reckoning. Its selection page is more careful: he worked on the picture on and off from about 1347 to 1350, when the major portions were completed. Huang lived until about 1354 and the inscription says he meant to keep working. No source read says whether he did.

The Taipei text describes the method. The composition was laid out first in light ink and finished with successive applications of darker and drier brushwork, with shapes slightly altered, contours strengthened and texture strokes or tree groups added here and there, and brush dots scattered across the surface as abstract accents. Taipei's exhibition site calls the brushwork a freehand sketching-ideas type in monochrome ink, with ink tones that trace back to the tenth-century masters Dong Yuan and Juran. The Khan Academy essay by Hung Sheng, a teaching text, names the vocabulary: long hemp-fibre strokes drawn down the mountain faces and angular alum-head strokes for the small rocks at the tops of the hills. The Taipei site describes the leaves on the Remaining Mountain as dotted with a horizontal brush in moist ink.

The handscroll is read from right to left, as a journey. It opens on the great mountain that survives as the Remaining Mountain, runs through river, hills and marsh, rises to a conical peak near the end and ebbs out into pale washes of distant hills over water. The long section is made of six sheets, according to the Taipei museum, with a seal stamped across each join. A China Daily exhibition guide of 2011 counts eight sheets, which contradicts the museum that owns the scroll. No fibre, pigment or sizing analysis of either piece appears in the sources read.

The dedication is a separate question. The Taipei selection page says the painting was made for a fellow Taoist named Master Wuyong, and Beijing Daily and Baidu Baike say Huang gave it to him. Shi Wanzhong observes that the inscription says only that Wuyong went with him and asked for the inscription, so whether the scroll was actually given to Wuyong awaits study. Zhang Guangbin's identification of Wuyong as Zheng Chu, whose style name was Wuyong, is the one Shi reports and Baidu Baike repeats. No source read says what happened to the scroll in the 1350s or in the following century.

Taipei's account is the plainest. Huang was born in 1269 at Changshu in present-day Jiangsu to a humble family and educated himself widely. In his youth he served as a clerk handling documents in the Jiang-Zhe Branch Secretariat and in his middle years was recommended for service in the capital, but he was implicated in a case and sentenced to prison. After serving his time he gave up any thought of rank, went home, became a Taoist by profession and developed his painting. Taipei's selection page adds that he was born Lu Jian and adopted by a ninety-year-old man called Huang Le of Yongjia who had no son, and that the old man's remark, which the Taipei translation renders 'Old Man Huang has always longed for a son', became the basis of the painter's new name. It also says he studied Taoism, became a follower of the Quanzhen sect and made a living in the Songjiang and Hangzhou regions by fortune-telling, with painting as an activity on the side.

He began painting around the age of fifty. The Taipei exhibition site says he was not a painter by profession, that Ming and Qing catalogues list only sixty-odd works in his name and that the surviving paintings are far fewer, mostly from his last years. It names as his principal works the scroll, Nine Pearly Peaks in Green (1346-8, which Wang Feng's inscription says Huang painted for Yang Weizhen), Nine Peaks Clearing After Snow (1349) in Beijing, Calling on Dai at Shan Stream (1349) in Yunnan and Great Summits of Fuchun in Nanjing. It also reproduces Huang's inscription on Cao Zhibo's painting of 1350, in which he admired the archaic plainness of Cao's brush idea. His circle, as Taipei lists it, ran from Zhao Mengfu through Cao Zhibo, Zhang Yu, Yang Weizhen and Ni Zan to Wang Feng.

What the scroll meant to its maker can be graded. Documented: the inscription shows that it was made at Fuchun in the company of a fellow Daoist who feared its seizure, and Taipei's catalogue text says it represents scenery of reclusion in Fuchun and, even more, Huang's idealized image of the landscape after his exploration of nature. Argued: the description attached to the museum's open-data image of the long section, copied onto Wikimedia Commons from the museum's digital archive, says Daoism flourished under the Mongols and sheltered many scholars, that Huang taught painting and that his Xie shanshui jue may have been his teaching notes, so that the scroll for Wuyong, also a Daoist, can be seen as a medium for the two men's discussion. That is the museum's reading, not a statement in any document by Huang.

Later readings should be labelled as such. Baidu Baike reads the picture's small figures, a fisherman, a woodcutter and a reader in a pavilion watching ducks, as roles a literatus of the Yuan could exchange, following the author Jiang Xun's 2012 book, and ties Huang's equanimity to his place in the fourth of the four classes into which the Mongol rulers divided their subjects. Dong Qichang's Southern School theory, which Taipei says fixed Huang in the Southern lineage and made him a model for the Four Wangs of the early Qing, is a reading made two and a half centuries later. The comparison with Wang Xizhi's Orchid Pavilion Preface is older, going back at least to the colophon of 1650 by the painter Zou Zhilin, as Baidu Baike prints it, who called Huang the Wang Xizhi of painting and this scroll his Orchid Pavilion.

The plain finding is that no source read identifies a hidden iconographic programme, a text the scroll illustrates, or a patron's instruction beyond the inscription. The documented meaning is a named landscape painted in the manner of Dong Yuan, Juran and Zhao Mengfu by a Daoist for a Daoist.

The first documented owner after the painter is Shen Zhou, about 137 years later. Nothing is recorded for the century in between. Shi reads a note by the Ming connoisseur Zhang Chou, written around 1616, as describing this scroll at the Wu family's house with colophons by Li Yingzhen and by Shen Zhou, which would mean an earlier colophon existed that is not mentioned anywhere else in the sources read. Shen's own colophon, dated the first day of summer in the first year of the Hongzhi reign, 1488, says in the English rendering on Baidu Baike that the painter's learning was overshadowed by his painting, that colophons by several famous hands had once been attached but had fallen off, and that the painting alone remained intact. It adds that the scroll 'was once in my collection but was lost', and that Assistant Prefect Fan had now bought it back.

The loss is told in three versions. The Taipei museum says Shen asked someone to inscribe the scroll and that person's son seized it and sold it at a high price. English Wikipedia says the inscriber was an unnamed calligrapher, and a People's Daily digest says it was a friend of Shen's. On the mid-autumn day of 1487, the Taipei text says, Shen painted a copy from memory to record his longing for it. That copy, 36.8 x 855 cm in ink and light colours, is now in the Palace Museum in Beijing, and Taipei calls it the earliest known imitation.

The sequence after that is documented in colophons. Wen Peng, writing in the fourth month of 1570, says Fan, an assistant prefect of Suzhou, acquired Shen's copy in 1487 and the original in 1488, 'truly forming a perfect pair', and that both had now passed to his friend Sizhong, that is Tan Zhiyi of Wuxi. Wen saw the two scrolls when Tan came to Nanjing. Wang Zhideng viewed them at Tan's Chenghuai Pavilion at Liangxi after the mid-autumn festival of 1571 and Zhou Tianqiu, forty-two days later, spent a whole day with both. Shi Wanzhong describes Tan as the son of the governor-general of the Two Guangs, holding a minor post by his father's rank, a calligrapher and a painter of birds and flowers. Fan's identity goes no further in the sources: English Wikipedia calls him Fan Shunju and says he commissioned Shen's inscription.

Between 1571 and 1596 the record thins again. Dong Qichang remembered pressing a Zhou in Beijing to show him the scroll again, and Shi calls this man Zhou Taimu and lists him as a holder. An Shaofang of Wuxi left two seals on it and Shi suggests he held it before about 1591. Shi also floats the collector Xiang Yuanbian as a possible holder, from the hall name in Zhou Tianqiu's colophon, while noting that the scroll bears no seal of his. A modern book by Zhang Yiqing and Cha Lu, cited by Shi, has the scroll passing from Tan to Dong in 1596, but Dong's own colophon names only a go-between, and the link is not documented.

Dong wrote his colophon on the seventh day of the tenth month of 1596, aboard a boat at Longhuapu. He says he had seen few handscrolls by the master that satisfied him, that this one, modelled on Dong Yuan and Juran, had both artless charm and consummate skill, and that when he was in Beijing he used to go to Zhou's establishment during breaks from morning court to ask for another look: 'I went with empty hands but returned enriched.' On a recent mission to Hunan, he continues, he had passed through Jingli, and his friend Hua Zhongfu had arranged the purchase. He kept the scroll in his Studio of Painting Meditation beside Wang Wei's Snow on the River, and he calls Huang 'my teacher'. That is the documented acquisition.

The popular chronology goes on that Dong, in old age, sold the scroll at a high price to Wu Zhengzhi of Yixing. English Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Baidu Baike and the People's Daily digest all say so. Shi Wanzhong argues that it was a pledge, not a sale, and that it happened around 1616 or 1617, not in Dong's last years, which ended with his death in 1636. This record grades the argument as argued, because it is a modern inference from dated texts.

His evidence runs as follows. A colophon of 1651 by Shen Hao quotes Wu Hongyu saying that Dong, a friend of his father's generation, pledged the scroll to Wu's late father for a thousand gold, followed by a clause that readers took to say that Dong soon died. Shi repunctuates the sentence so that the man who soon died is Wu's father, a court official, and says the dates exclude the first reading. Dong's own note of spring 1614 still calls the scroll his. Zhang Chou's book, finished around the mid-autumn of 1616, places it with the Wu family in Yixing. Wu Zhengzhi, who stamped the scroll with his seals about ten times, died on the twenty-second day of the tenth month of 1617 by the Chinese calendar, according to the Wu clan genealogy as Shi cites it. In 1626 and 1627 Dong wrote that the Fuchun scroll had once been his. Shi connects the timing to the riot of 1616 at Dong's home town, when four of his houses were burned according to a source he quotes, and proposes that he raised money by pledging his best handscroll to a friend of his own examination year. Shi adds that Dong tried to redeem it around 1621 and that the Wu family's elder, Wu Daike, died soon after. These last points are Shi's inferences, and this record carries them as argued.

The money is stated only as 'qianjin', a thousand gold, and no source says what was pledged against or in what weight or coin. Shi takes the figure as a sum. Dong himself later acquired Shen Zhou's memory copy, in the autumn of 1626 by his own account, thirty-one years after he got the original, and wrote that the two scrolls had come together only after that interval. He is the one man known to have owned both, and on Shi's reading he still counted the pledged scroll as his own in 1627.

Wu Zhengzhi, also known as Wu Zhiju, was a classmate of Dong in the examination year. He named his garden Yunqi lou and asked Dong for paintings of it. His seals, including the one that straddles each join of the six sheets, are the physical proof that the scroll was whole in his hands. He left the scroll to his son Wu Hongyu, also called Wenqing, a provincial graduate of 1615. The sources do not agree on whether Hongyu was the third son (Shi's introduction), the youngest son (Shi's appendix) or a grandson (Baidu Baike). The chain is the same either way.

Hongyu gave it a room of its own, the Fuchun Xuan, which different sources place in the Yunqi lou or in his Fengyin garden. Zou Zhilin, whose colophon of 1650 is on the scroll, wrote that Hongyu kept it by his pillow and at his table, and that at the fall of the dynasty in 1644 he cared for nothing and fled barefoot carrying this scroll alone. Baidu Baike, quoting Yun Shouping, adds Zhiyong's Thousand Character Classic as the only other treasure he took. The painter Shen Hao says that around 1630 he was invited to the Yunqi lou, saw the scroll with two friends and was allowed to stay more than a hundred days making a copy.

The fire is told differently in each source and the differences matter. The earliest text read is Shen Hao's colophon of 1651. He had heard that when Hongyu was dying he ordered the scroll consigned to the fire, wishing to take it with him to the realm of fragrance, that the fire had not reached halfway, and that the remains were hurried out of the embers. Yun Shouping's account, quoted by Beijing Daily, says Hongyu had two scrolls he loved, Zhiyong's Thousand Character Classic and the Fuchun scroll, and meant them as burial goods. He wrote an offering text for both, had the Classic burned the day before and watched its ashes, and the next morning poured wine and put the Fuchun scroll to the fire himself, returning to his bedroom when the flames grew fierce; his nephew Wu Jing'an then rushed to the place and drew it out of the red furnace. Zhou Lianggong's reading notes, quoted by Shi, says only the front half burned, that the heir pulled it out and that he tried to sell it to Zou Zhilin for a thousand gold, which Zou could not pay, so Zou inscribed the end and returned it.

The Taipei museum's text says only that the scroll was burned in 1650 when the collector was dying and a family member saved it. English Wikipedia names the nephew Wu Jing'an, Chinese Wikipedia calls him Wu Zhendu, and Shi gives Wu Zi wen, also called Zhenming. The date is also unsettled. Taipei and Wikipedia say 1650, the Taipei Times wire report says 1651, and Shi observes that the twelfth month of that gengyin year ran over into 1651 by the Western calendar, which fits Chinese Wikipedia's statement that Hongyu died on the third day of the twelfth month of the seventh year of Shunzhi.

A fourth version appears in popular retellings, among them the People's Daily digest and the Khan Academy essay: the nephew disobeyed his dying uncle and rescued the scroll by throwing another painting into the flames. No source read dates that version, and the two earliest accounts, by Shen Hao and Yun Shouping, do not contain it. It is carried here as tradition.

What the fire did to the object is better evidenced than why it happened. Beijing Daily says the roll burned through in a row of holes and the front was lost, leaving a large and a small piece. Shi, citing the dealer Wu Qizhen's Record of Paintings and Calligraphy, says the burned first sheet was peeled away and a survivor of about one chi five or six cun, which is roughly the 51.4 cm of the fragment, was kept. Taipei's text says the first sheet of the long section still shows repair marks. Wu Hufan's photograph of the two pieces laid together shows five scorch marks at nearly equal intervals, growing larger toward the fragment, one of them directly under the join seal, which fits across the break. Beijing Daily adds that the fragment is 1.8 cm narrower than the long section because it was trimmed. The museums' figures of 31.8 and 33 cm differ by only 1.2 cm, a discrepancy this record cannot resolve.

Beijing Daily also says that Dong Qichang's colophon, originally at the tail of the scroll, was cut off and moved to the front to hide the fire damage. The paper links this to the scroll's name, a link that does not follow, since the name comes from the painter's own inscription. The Taipei open-data image among the plates here does show a block of inscription ending with Dong's name and a date in the cyclical year bingshen mounted beside a stretch of landscape at the head of the long section, but nothing in the image says when it was moved. Zou Zhilin's colophon already remarks that the year of painting and the year of his visit were both gengyin, and Baidu Baike quotes the scholar Fu Shen as saying the scroll was born, destroyed and made famous in gengyin years. It is a remark about the calendar, not an explanation of anything.

The chain of the long section from 1651 to 1746 is documented in outline by colophons, seals and the catalogues of its owners, and in conflict in places. Shi Wanzhong's table and Shan Guoqiang's paper, both by specialists, give the same sequence with small differences.

In 1652 the dealer Wu Qizhen, who recorded it in his Record of Paintings and Calligraphy, went on 24 May with a friend to see the scroll in Danyang at Zhang Fanwo's house. Zhang Bojun, as he was also called, was so devoted to collecting that he would pawn land and houses for it. Soon after, around 1656 or 1657, it was in the Ji family of Taixing. Ji Yuyong, whose son Ji Zhenyi became a famous book collector, left several seals on it, and Cheng Zhengkui made a copy at Ji's house in 1657 that the court catalogue Shiqu Baoji later recorded. Shi mentions an owner with the seal 'Zhou Bingwen' around 1654 and a son of Ji, Ji Nangong, around 1673, from Liu Peng's 2018 article in the Palace Museum Journal, which was not seen.

By 1693 it belonged to Gao Shiqi, an official at the Kangxi court, who described it in his catalogue of that year and, according to a colophon of Shen Deqian's, paid 600 gold for it. The same colophon says it passed to Wang Hongxu, a senior Kangxi official, for the same sum. According to Shan Guoqiang, Wang Hongxu summoned the painter Wang Hui to Beijing and Wang Hui made his sixth copy of the scroll in 1696 with the original before him, the first of his copies not taken from another copy. Wang Hongxu died in 1723. Shan has his family selling the scroll to An Qi after that. Shen Deqian's colophon, however, says that in 1728 he saw it at a house in the Huangli lane in Suzhou, where Wang's family wanted a thousand gold for it and no one in Wu had the means, and that it was then taken toward Yangzhou. In the autumn of 1735, lodging in the capital, he saw it again in An Qi's possession, when a friend borrowed it and invited him to look.

An Qi was a salt merchant of Tianjin and Yangzhou, descended from a Korean family enrolled in the Eight Banners, and his father had been a major salt dealer. His Moyuan Huiguan, a catalogue he completed around 1742, records the paintings and calligraphy he owned, and Chinese Wikipedia calls his collection unrivalled within the seas. The account Shi follows, from Zhang Yiqing and Cha Lu, says An's household fell on hard times and that the scroll was sold to the court in 1746 through the Grand Secretary Fuheng.

The prices in this chain are uneven: a thousand pledged around 1616, six hundred paid by Gao and by Wang, a thousand asked in 1728 and two thousand paid in 1746. Every figure is in the unit the source gives, 'jin', and none of the sources says whether it means gold, silver or a conventional large sum. No wage or price series for the period was consulted for a comparison, so none is offered.

Qianlong wrote all over the copy and left the genuine scroll almost clean. The Taipei museum states that the Ziming scroll entered the imperial collection in 1745, a year before the Master Wuyong Scroll, and that the emperor regarded the Ziming as the original. Shi quotes the inscription that Liang Shizheng wrote on the long section at the emperor's order. It says that in the winter of 1746 someone offered paintings and calligraphy for sale, many of them true works of famous men, and that this scroll was among them. Placed beside the Ziming scroll, the emperor realised that the one he had held was the true Fuchun Shanju; Dong's colophon was on both without a word changed; the brushwork of this new one was weak, so it was certainly a forgery; but the painting style was elegant and pleasing, like a tracing copy one grade below the genuine, and there was no harm in keeping both. It then says the scroll was kept together with what was offered for sale, for two thousand.

That wording means the figure may have bought a lot of works and not the scroll alone, a point the sources that state two thousand as the scroll's price do not raise. China Daily says two thousand taels of gold and the Baidu Baike page says two thousand taels of silver, and the inscription itself says only 'jin'. If the 1728 asking price of a thousand in Shen Deqian's colophon is on the same scale, the court paid twice the earlier asking price, but only if the sum was for the scroll alone.

The emperor's attachment to the Ziming scroll was long. The Taipei museum says that from about the first southern tour of 1751 he often took it in his luggage and wrote on it at scenic stops, and quotes his inscription of 1784: 'On the six southern tours, the scenery of mountains and rivers I experienced was majestic and grand. At the time I took out this handscroll to corroborate it, (the scenery) matched in every way.' Beijing Daily and Shi count more than fifty places with his writing across forty-eight years; China Daily says about forty poems and cites one of 1794, when he was eighty-four. When no blank was left he wrote on the front separator that he would inscribe it no more. The Wuyong scroll carries only Liang Shizheng's note in the emperor's name, which Chinese Wikipedia observes is why its blank paper survived.

The Ziming scroll was the one inscribed 'for the recluse Ziming' in autumn 1338, a date twelve years earlier than the real scroll's inscription. Its inscription sits in the empty space above the picture and not after it, a placement that Beijing Daily says did not match Yuan practice. Fu Shen proposed in 1993 that the Ziming scroll is a Ming copy on oiled paper that was altered, with the copyist's signature cut off and a new Huang inscription and false colophon added, which would explain why its end is missing. The scroll bears the seals of Qu Shisi and Tang Yuzhao, and Wang Hui's first copy of 1662 was made for Tang from such a scroll. Xu Bangda, according to Shan Guoqiang, held the Qu seals and Tang's to be genuine, and Shan agrees with Fu. This is graded argued: Fu Shen made the case in print, Shan endorses it, and no dissent appears in the sources read.

How the verdict was reversed is told several ways. Beijing Daily says the painter Xu Bangda looked at both scrolls in the Palace Museum's Shanghai storehouse in 1933, noticed the burn and repair marks on the Wuyong scroll and the improper placement of the Ziming inscription, and overturned the Qing judgement; it adds that a view crediting Wu Hufan appears in no biography of him. The People's Daily digest says scholars raised doubts after the dynasty fell and the question was settled in the 1970s. The Taipei museum says its own 1956 catalogue, Gugong Shuhua Lu, published during the Beigou years, listed both scrolls and carried an editor's note that the Wuyong scroll is the original. Baidu Baike and English Wikipedia say the judgement was corrected in 1816 when the third edition of the court catalogue Shiqu Baoji was compiled, while Beijing Daily says that third edition was compiled by Hu Jing and others after the emperor's death and still left the long section unvindicated. Those two statements cannot both be right and this record does not choose between them.

The long section carries, beside the painter's inscription, colophons by Shen Zhou (1488), Wen Peng (1570), Wang Zhideng (1571), Zhou Tianqiu, Dong Qichang (1596) and Zou Zhilin (1650), plus Shen Deqian's two colophons and Liang Shizheng's note for Qianlong. Shi's seal table records, in order, two seals of An Shaofang, three of Wu Zhiju or Wu Zhengzhi, seven of the Ji family of Taixing, the unassigned Jiang Changgeng seal, seven of Wang Hongxu, one of Zhou Bingwen, five of Qianlong including the Shiqu Baoji and Baoji Sanbian seals, two of the Jiaqing emperor and one of the Xuantong emperor.

Three things follow from the table. The seals of Wu Zhiju straddle the joins of the painting's sheets, which is what let Wu Hufan match the fragment. There are no seals for the owners between Wu Hongyu and the Ji family, so the Danyang stage rests on Wu Qizhen's record alone. And the seals of Wang Hongxu on the join and tail of the colophons lead Shi to think Zou Zhilin's colophon was mounted on the scroll only once it reached Wang's hands, which is his inference. The seal of the Xuantong emperor shows that the last Qing court also handled the scroll.

The fragment is mounted as a separate scroll, which Wu Hufan made. Its wrapper title, in Wu's hand, calls it the true trace of the Fuchun Shanju scroll, a charred remnant, treasure of the Meijing Shuwu. It opens with the frontispiece Fuchun Yi Jiao and a portrait of Huang by Wang Tongyu, who inscribed it as a copy from the Five Hundred Worthies at the age of eighty-five. Shen Yinmo wrote a title in regular script, dated New Year's Day 1939, saying that the scroll had belonged to the Wu family of Jingxi's Yunqi lou, that the front part had perished and the rear part had long gone to the Qing court, and that he and Hufan had seen it while serving on a review of Palace Museum paintings; the previous winter, Hufan had acquired the fragment. The front separator, in Wu Hufan's hand, calls it the first divine work of the master of painting; the rear separator is a note by his wife Pan Jingshu. Behind the picture are Wang Tingbin's colophon, the photograph Wu took of the two pieces joined, a diagram of the scorch marks, his copies of the Ming colophons and his own account of the transmission and a poem. A white seal 'Wu' crosses the join. Beijing Daily calls the whole a panorama of the fragment's history, built so that a few tens of centimetres of painting stand at the end of several metres of paper.

After the fire the surviving opening went to the dealer Wu Qizhen, who recorded in 1652 that the burned first sheet, once peeled, still kept a piece of about one chi five or six cun. In 1669 it was in the hands of Wang Tingbin of Guangning, who mounted it in an album titled Sanchao Baohui and wrote the colophon that tells the story of the fire. The Zhejiang museum's page calls the colophon writer Wang Tingbao, a variant of the name.

Then it disappears for two and a half centuries. Beijing Daily and Shi both say that the album ended up with a family named Chen in Jiangyin, who did not know what they had and broke the album up to sell leaf by leaf. In the autumn of 1938 the owner of the Jigu Ge shop in Shanghai, Cao Youqing, brought a battered leaf from that album to Wu Hufan, who was ill at home. Wu Hufan, a painter, collector and connoisseur of the first rank, saw at once what it might be. Beijing Daily and the People's Daily digest say he gave a bronze from his own collection to acquire it, a vessel the Beijing paper calls a Zhou dun, the digest a Shang or Zhou bronze and Baidu Baike a Shang yi. The type is therefore not settled. Both papers add that Wu recovered from a month of illness once he had the fragment, and the Beijing paper says he wrote a poem.

Wu then proved it, by Beijing Daily's account, in three ways. He and Cao went to the Chen house and found Wang Tingbin's colophon among scrap paper. He photographed the fragment and the long section together, which showed that the white square seal of Wu Zhiju at the join closed neatly across the break even though the fragment had been trimmed. And he drew the five scorch marks as one line. The identification of the long section as authentic had been accepted only a few years before, and Beijing Daily says Wu had seen the long section in 1935 while serving on the review committee for the Palace Museum pieces sent to London. From then on he called his house the home of the man with a corner of Dachi's Fuchun mountains.

In 1956 he sold it. Beijing Daily's account, drawn from the recollections of Wang Jiying, then a member of the Zhejiang Cultural Relics Management Committee, says that the committee's Sha Menghai, a calligrapher who knew Wu, worked for the purchase, asked the collectors Qian Jingtang and Xie Zhiliu to help, and that Wu asked 5,000 yuan. That, the paper says, was a very large sum in the 1950s and swallowed most of the committee's annual budget, and the committee, which was not a collecting body, had no fixed fund for acquisitions. Some experts doubted the fragment, and there was a rumour, which Wang Jiying had only heard, that Wu made the sale conditional on the committee also taking a Yuan painting by Wang Meng that nearly everyone thought false. The deputy director, Li Chengquan, decided to buy, and in one of his articles wrote that he strongly urged the purchase of the Fuchun remnant and was slandered on all sides. The Zhejiang museum's own page gives the source of the fragment simply as sold by Wu Hufan and classes it as a first-class object. The Taipei museum says the fragment entered the Zhejiang museum in 1956.

It has been shown rarely. In 2010 the Zhejiang museum's new Wulin branch showed it for three months, which Beijing Daily counted as only the fourth public showing in more than fifty years, against earlier showings of ten days at most and as short as one day. Zhejiang News said in November 2025 that the 11 November to 7 December showing at the Zhijiang branch was the ninth, the third year running there. The museum keeps it in climate-controlled storage at other times.

After 1746 the long section lay in the Qing palace for 187 years, in the People's Daily digest's count. The Palace Museum was founded in the Forbidden City in 1925, according to the Taipei museum's chronicle. In 1933, with Japanese forces at Shanhaiguan, the Palace Museum began moving its best pieces south. Beijing Daily and the People's Daily digest agree that the Fuchun scrolls went with more than ten thousand crates to Shanghai and then Nanjing, that in the war years the collection travelled by way of Sichuan and Guizhou, that after the war it came back to Nanjing, and that the long section was shipped to Taiwan at the end of 1948. The Guardian and Baidu Baike say 1949. The Taipei museum's chronicle records a first shipment of 320 crates in 1948 stored at Yangmei, the Beigou storehouse completed in 1950 and the Taipei museum opened in 1965. None of the sources read says which shipment carried this scroll.

In the Taipei museum the long section has been catalogued as Gu Hua 001016. The 1956 Gugong Shuhua Lu confirmed it as the original. In October 1984 the museum designated twenty paintings and calligraphies as restricted display works, and in 1992 raised the number to sixty, with this scroll among them. In 2010 Chen Hao of the Zhejiang museum put the number of works that never leave the museum at seventy, a figure that does not match the museum's own sixty. In 2011 Xinmin Evening News reported, citing the Zhejiang museum's director, that the Taipei museum's rule for its most restricted pieces was a maximum of forty days on show and that it planned to rest the Wuyong scroll for about four years afterwards.

The scroll was shown again in the museum's centenary exhibition Jiazi Wannian, which ran from 4 October 2025 to 4 January 2026, and the museum's pages for that show reproduce its catalogue entry. The sources read do not give the days on which the scroll itself was on view.

The record of the negotiations comes mostly from Chinese-language press, with a few English wire reports and Taipei Times. In July 1999 Yang Jianxin, then head of the Zhejiang Taiwan affairs office, arranged a week of joint copying of the scroll on the Fuchun River by more than thirty painters from both sides, a substitute for the originals' meeting. In 2005 the Zhejiang museum, through the chairman of Phoenix TV, Liu Changle, received an answer from Taiwan: the Remaining Mountain could go first to Taiwan, and whether the long section would come to the mainland was not to be discussed. Yang said Zhejiang wanted a promise of a later return visit, and Taiwan would not give even that. In 2009 the Palace Museum in Beijing lent thirty-seven objects to Taipei for the Yongzheng exhibition, which Xinhua called the first joint exhibition of the two museums.

On 14 March 2010, at the end of the National People's Congress, Premier Wen Jiabao told a Taiwanese reporter that he hoped the two halves of the painting could one day become one: a painting is like this, and how then can people bear it. The People's Daily digest prints the full remark in Chinese, and Xinmin Evening News adds that he said not to lose five thousand years of culture because of fifty years of politics. The Taipei Times reported that local media generally read the remark as a metaphor for his wish for unification of Taiwan and China. The museum's director, Chou Kung-shin, said the next day that the museum was open to bringing the first half to Taiwan, perhaps by 2012, but that Taiwanese-owned relics would not be shown in China unless Beijing amended its laws to guarantee their return. In June 2010 the governor of Zhejiang, Lu Zushan, visited Taiwan and offered to send the Remaining Mountain, and in January 2011 the two museums signed a memorandum at Fuyang, Xinhua and Xinmin report.

The legal fear was the one Chou stated. Xinmin lists Taipei's two conditions for any loan to the mainland as use of the name National Palace Museum and a clause of judicial immunity from seizure. Beijing Daily quotes Chen Hao of the Zhejiang museum saying he found the second concern needless, because the Customs Law of the People's Republic of China and the rules on relics entering and leaving the country require objects brought in to leave again within six months. Xinmin explains that the clause is meant to protect a museum holding disputed objects from legal claims and that adopting such a clause may forfeit the right to recover objects that were looted or stolen. It adds that Taipei's more than 700,000 objects came mostly from the mainland, that the mainland has no such clause, and that a scholar had suggested writing immunity into a cross-strait cultural agreement between the two semi-official bodies. No source read says the clause was ever enacted, and the loan ran one way. The sources read do not describe any Chinese export permit or Taiwanese import permit for the Remaining Mountain.

The handover was staged. On 11 May 2011 the Zhejiang museum, closed for the day, checked the object into a custom case and handed it to the China Cultural Relics Exchange Centre, which would deliver it to Beijing; routes and dates were kept secret. Chen Hao said the handover to Taiwan was planned for 18 May, International Museum Day, to Taiwan's Quanta Culture and Education Foundation, which would pass it to the National Palace Museum, and Xinmin says it was to leave Beijing for Taipei that day. The sources read do not give the arrival date. Chen Hao said the Zhejiang museum valued it at 150 million yuan and that the insurance, set at 0.1 to 0.3 per cent of the valuation, would be paid by the Taipei museum, which by simple arithmetic is a premium of 150,000 to 450,000 yuan. No conversion to another currency is offered here. The conditions asked for were a case at 20 to 24 degrees Celsius and 58 to 63 per cent humidity, with light at 50 lux. Xinmin says it was the first time the fragment had left the museum for display outside the mainland.

Landscape Reunited opened on 1 June with a ceremony and to the public on 2 June, and ran to 5 September. The two scrolls were shown together only in the first rotation, 2 June to 31 July, in one case of about sixteen metres, which Xinhua puts at 16 and Xinmin at 16.5. A three-dimensional animation of the scroll was shown nearby on a 40-metre screen. The Guardian's wire copy called it a 40-day exhibition and Xinhua gave 25 September as the closing date, both inconsistent with the Taipei museum's own dates. The Art Newspaper counted 847,509 visitors, 8,828 a day, for 2 June to 5 September. Lien Chan, honorary chairman of the Kuomintang, called the reunion a historic event, and Li Daoxiang of the Academy of Chinese Culture told Xinhua that without better relations across the strait there would have been no such chance.

How to read this politically is a matter for named people. The Guardian, citing Associated Press, said the exhibition was widely seen as a gesture by the Chinese government in support of President Ma Ying-jeou's efforts to engage the mainland. Chloe Estep, in Comparative Literature in 2025, argues that officials of the People's Republic used the painting to create a false narrative of China's historical national integrity, and sets against that the poem cycle that Zhai Yongming wrote in 2016. In October 2023 Reuters reported that the Eastern Theatre Command of the People's Liberation Army released an animated short on National Day in which two elves, representing the two pieces, came together at the end, with shots of aircraft carriers and fighter jets inserted between. The sources read show no further joint display since 2011.

The Taipei museum lists the Ming and Qing painters known to have copied it: Shen Zhou, Dong Qichang, Zhang Hong, Shen Hao, Zou Zhilin (spelled Zhou Zhilin on the museum's page), Yun Xiang, Wang Shimin, Cheng Zhengkui, Wang Hui, Wu Li, Yun Shouping and, in the early twentieth century, Jin Cheng. Some were made from memory, some traced and some from tracings, and they date from both before and after the fire. Wang Hui alone made eight copies, according to Shan Guoqiang, of which three survive: one for Da Chongguang, made in 1672 at the age of forty-one and now in the Freer Gallery in Washington, one of 1686 made from memory and now in the Liaoning Provincial Museum, and one of 1702 now in the Palace Museum in Beijing. Baidu Baike calls the copies by Zhang Hong and Zou Zhilin the closest to the whole scroll before the fire. A later bibliography exists in English, in A. John Hay's 1978 dissertation, which prints the text of the Xie shanshui jue, in Hin-cheung Lovell's 1970 article in Ars Orientalis on Wang Hui's Fuchun scrolls, in Fu Shen's 1993 article on the Freer scroll and in Lou Qiuhua's 2010 two-volume study of true and false Fuchun scrolls. Those were confirmed in the Smithsonian Libraries catalogue and not read.

In the present century it has also become a public emblem. China Post issued six stamps with the whole scroll as their subject in 2010, with a total face value of 9.30 yuan, according to Baidu Baike, with a first-day ceremony at Fuyang on 20 March. Chinese Wikipedia says the Taipei museum stated it had not granted the post office the rights to the Wuyong scroll's image. English Wikipedia lists apartment developments named after the scroll. The 2013 film Switch, whose Chinese title carries the scroll's name, has Andy Lau tracking down a stolen painting. A 2019 drama directed by Gu Xiaogang, titled Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains in English, borrowed the name and had its premiere at Cannes on 22 May 2019.

A student has some resources. The Taipei museum has published its digital images of the long section under its open-data terms, and a CC0 detail of it is on Wikimedia Commons. The 2011 exhibition catalogue, edited by He Chuanxin (Ho Chuan-hsing), runs to 363 pages. No open IIIF manifest for either piece was found.