Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies

The Admonitions Scroll, traditionally given to Gu Kaizhi, out for its six weeks of the year in Room 91a, with the Ode to the Goddess of the Luo River beside it. Free, but a timed ticket is required and slots release weekly.

The Admonitions Scroll is painted in ink and colour on silk, and silk lit for long periods does not recover. The British Museum's conservation limit is absolute and public: the work may be displayed for six weeks in any year. This display, 13 July to 24 August 2026, is that entire allowance spent. For the other forty-six weeks the object is in the dark, and a visitor to Room 91a will find the case empty and a digital surrogate running downstairs in Room 33.

That single fact governs how this page should be read. Almost every other entry in this section is a show you can decide to see over some months. This is a forty-three-day window on an object that, on the museum's own reckoning, is one of the earliest surviving Chinese paintings on silk in any collection anywhere. Missing it means waiting a year, and the museum does not publish which six weeks it will choose next.

The painting illustrates a poem written by the official Zhang Hua, who lived about AD 232 to 300, as a rebuke aimed at the conduct of an empress. It is traditionally attributed to Gu Kaizhi, about AD 345 to 406, and the museum states plainly that it probably dates instead to somewhere between AD 400 and 700 - which is to say it is very likely a later copy of a lost original, and the attribution is a tradition rather than a finding.

Scholarship has not settled it. The long-standing reading is that it is a Tang dynasty copy; a growing number of specialists now reject the supposed copyist's errors that argument rests on and place it earlier, in the Southern and Northern dynasties, between 420 and 589. Nothing in the room resolves this, and the honest position is that a range of roughly three centuries is still live.

What hangs is also incomplete. The original painting ran to twelve scenes. Nine survive here; the first three are gone. A complete twelve-scene version in monochrome, made in the Song dynasty, is in the Palace Museum in Beijing, so the missing opening is known from a copy rather than lost outright. Shown beside the scroll is the Ode to the Goddess of the Luo River, another handscroll in Gu's manner, illustrating Prince Cao Zhi's imagined meeting with a river deity. Seeing two works that preserve the same style in one room is the specific reason to make the journey.

The scroll was in the Forbidden City in the eighteenth century. The Qianlong emperor, who reigned 1736 to 1795, treated it as a summit of Chinese painting, had it remounted in 1746 and added material of his own: a title inscription, a colophon, a painting of an orchid by his own hand, and a painting by Zou Yigui at the end. Those additions are part of the object now and are themselves evidence of how it was valued.

It left China during the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion. Captain Clarence Johnson, 1870 to 1937, of the First Bengal Lancers, was in Beijing between August and October 1900 and took part in the Siege of the International Legations. The British Museum's own page states only that it bought the scroll from him and that he was in Beijing in 1900. It does not say how he got it, and the accounts do not agree. Johnson's family maintained he was given it by a Chinese noblewoman in return for protecting her household; the researcher Si Xiao, writing for the 100 Histories of 100 Worlds in One Object project, records that this claim has no corroboration, sets it against the documented looting by the eight allied nations, and argues the acquisition cannot be treated as value-neutral whatever happened in the individual case. An encyclopaedic account instead places the removal among the looting at the Summer Palace. We record the disagreement rather than choosing between the three.

The purchase itself is not disputed: the museum bought it in 1903 for twenty-five pounds. Sidney Colvin and Laurence Binyon are credited with recognising what it was - the story runs that the seller's interest was in a jade toggle attached to it. Twenty-five pounds in 1903 for one of the earliest Chinese paintings in existence is the kind of transaction this archive exists to record precisely, and Si Xiao names it with the Chinese term jianlou, acquiring a thing at a grossly mistaken price.

In 1914 and 1915 the museum had the handscroll taken apart and remounted, work carried out by Japanese specialists with the British conservator Stanley Littlejohn using Japanese folding-screen technique. The scroll was dismantled and laid onto two long stretchers: one carrying the nine scenes of the painting, the other carrying everything else, with the Zou Yigui painting mounted separately as an album leaf.

This is why the object is shown flat rather than as a scroll. A handscroll is designed to be unrolled by hand at arm's length, a section at a time, in an order the viewer controls; the colophons that follow it are part of that sequence and record who owned and judged it. Cutting the painting from its colophons and fixing both to boards ended that, and it cannot be undone. It was done in good faith by the standards of 1914 and it is now generally described as irreversible harm - a straightforward instance of a museum's own conservation decision becoming part of what a later visitor is looking at.

The display itself has drawn no published review that we could find; the sustained published argument around this object is not about how it is hung but about whether it should be in London at all, and about what the museum's own 1914 remounting did to it.