Minneapolis Institute of Art

Duxiu Peak, after a Chinese painting

Aoki Mokubei

Date

1827

Medium

Hanging scroll, ink and color on paper

Department

Asian Art

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Japanese paintings of China often depict imagined locales, but this lone mountain peak rising dramatically at river’s edge is an actual place: Duxiufeng, or “Solitary Beauty Peak, ” on the banks of the Li River in south-central China. In the late 1300s, this mountain—which poets described as so beautiful that no other mountain could compare—was chosen as the site for an enormous estate constructed for a prince under the first emperor of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the Hongwu emperor. Thereafter, generations of imperial princes called the palace home until the mid-1700s, when the dynasty came to an end. Even today the site is dubbed “City of Princes.” The mountain, palace, and the site’s 5, 000-foot-long walls are all described in an inscription in the upper right of the painting by Rai San’yō (1780–1832), a scholar in Japan’s capital of Edo (now Tokyo). Another inscription, at left, is by the painter himself, who records that he modeled this work after a Chinese painting he had seen in a friend’s collection. Asia

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