The Chinese painting of architectural subjects--buildings, boats, wheeled vehicles, and other mechanical apparatuses--is called jiehua.(n1) The term translates literally as "ruler-lined painting," meaning that the painter uses not only the brush but also such tools as ruler and compass, square and straightedge, like a mason or carpenter. By 960, the founding year of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1126), the practice of jiehua already went back more than a millennium. Since the time of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi (r. 221-210 B.C.E.), this tradition was related to the building of real palaces and temples. Under Northern Song court patronage jiehua reached its zenith and, for the first time, gained recognition as an independent genre in contemporary art criticism.(n2) A rare example from this golden age is a horizontal scroll that represents a water mill, now in the Shanghai Museum. The artist is unknown, and the painting bears no original title. Although popularly known as The Sluice Gate with Freight Carts (Zhakou panche tu), it will be called the Shanghai Water Mill or The Water Mill for convenience (Fig. 1).(n3)

The first celebrated Northern Song exponent of jiehua painting was Guo Zhongshu (ca. 910-977), canonized already in contemporary private and official biographical accounts.(n4) A child prodigy, he developed into an eccentric scholar-official and a brilliant painter of scientific learning. The eleventh-century art historian Liu Daochun (ca. 1028-ca. 1094) reported, "Guo's paintings of architectural constructions, towers, and belvederes were unsurpassed in his time.... He completely mastered the principal methods of masons and carpenters and scarcely diverged from them."(n5) This was confirmed by another eleventh-century writer, the Buddhist monk-scholar Wenying (d. after 1078), who described Guo Zhongshu's encounter with the most famous early Northern Song architect, Yu Hao (active ca. 965-95):

Guo Zhongshu painted palaces and multistoried pavilions in row after row. Carpenters would measure them and could not find any flaws in the calculations. When Emperor Taizong [r. 976-97] heard Guo's name, he summoned him to the Agency of the Assistant in the Directorate of Construction. Before building the Great Pagoda of the Kaibao Temple,(n6) the Master Carpenter Yu Hao from Zhe [modern Zhejiang] prepared [a plan of] a thirteen-storied structure. Guo used a reduced-size design to check [the accuracy of] the pagoda's measurements from the ground floor up and found a calculating error of one foot and five inches that would be fatal to the construction. Guo then warned Hao, "You had better reexamine it." Hao, thereafter, could not sleep for several nights; he carefully checked his design and finally found the error, exactly as Guo had told him. One dawn, Hao knocked on Guo's door and knelt [before Guo] for a long time to express his gratitude.(n7)

Clearly the Northern Song valued accuracy in measurement and exactness in drawing; in this story Guo Zhongshu surpassed the imperial architect himself in the mastery of mathematical and technical skills. The critic Li Zhi (1059-1109), writing in 1098, gave a more detailed account of Guo Zhongshu's facility:

As for painting architectural constructions, towers, and pavilions, Shuxian [Guo's alias] arrived at his own style, which was the most wonderful of all. [In his paintings] roof beams, girders, pillars, and rafters are shown with open spaces between, through which one might move. Railings, lintels, windows, and doorways look as if they could really be passed through, or opened and shut. A hao length [that is, 1/3 decimillimeter] is used to mark off an inch; a fen length [1/3 centimeter] to mark off a foot; and an inch to mark off ten feet; increasing thus with every multiple, so that when a large building is drawn, everything is to scale and there are never even slight discrepancies.(n8)

The above description is borne out by Guo Zhongshu's only surviving work, Traveling on the River in Clearing Snow.(n9) A close-up of the two heavily loaded commercial boats (Fig. 2) shows the meticulous and intricate rendering of architecture with the same thin, firm, even, and continuous line drawing and exquisite details of tracery patterns on the wooden panels. The roundness of high masts, the strength of ropes and cables, the weight of the curtains, the solidity of baskets and barrels of goods define complex spatial relationships and give convincing volume to the architecture of the boat. Traveling on the River in Clearing Snow exhibits how Guo Zhongshu "completely mastered the principal methods of masons and carpenters" and how he created open spaces "through which one might move."

Liu Daochun, Wenying, and Li Zhi were all independent writers. A reliable institutional view of jiehua painting from the court perspective is found in the 1120 imperial painting catalogue Xuanhe huapu (henceforth, Xuanhe Catalogue), compiled under the personal supervision of Emperor Huizong (r. 1101-25). The Xuanhe Catalogue divides painting into ten subject categories of twenty chapters and lists a total of 6,396 scrolls(n10) in the imperial collection under the names of 231 painters dating from the third to the early twelfth century (Fig. 3).

These ten categories, as the preface to the table of contents (xumu) of the Xuanhe Catalogue states, are ordered according to the importance attached to each category. Religious subjects are traditionally placed before all secular affairs.(n11) "Human figures" is of the second greatest import for its didactic function and exhibition of social hierarchy. "Architectural subjects" is the third for a simple and practical reason--the necessity and function of architecture in the evolution of human survival against natural elements:

In the time of remote ages [our ancestors] lived in caves or trees. Later sages established the standards [of housing] with ridge poles and rafters above and foundations below to provide shelter from wind and rain. Different forms of architecture, palaces and houses, terraces and pavilions, farmhouses and city dwellings, whether refined or primitive, ornate or simple, all reflect the fashion and the style of different times. This is why the painting of architectural subjects comes third.(n12)

The small number of artists active in jiehua painting and their works seems to contradict the stated importance of architectural painting. The same catalogue offers an explanation:

Palaces and houses are built in accordance with their given measurements; terraces and gates have their set standards.... Painters painstakingly picture their forms and shapes not merely for the sake of the pictorial splendor of terraces and pavilions, doors and windows. Every dot and line must follow the rules of drawing. It is more difficult than other paintings. No wonder from the times of the Jin [265-420] and [Liu] Song [420-479] to Liang [502-557] and Sui [581-618], no competent painters [of this genre] were ever heard of.... From the Tang [618-907] and Five Dynasties [907-60] until the present time, there have been only four who can be considered true heirs of the tradition. This shows how difficult it really is to master the technique of drawing in this category of painting.(n13)

Thus, the reason for the small number of jiehua artists and scrolls in the Xuanhe Catalogue was not because architectural painting enjoyed less popularity than other categories like landscape, animals, and flowers and birds but because it was the most difficult to execute. Painting jiehua was a technically challenging task and required knowledge of mathematics and engineering. The Northern Song patrons expected a high level of scientific knowledge from their jiehua painters.

The Shanghai Water Mill is the earliest surviving image of the water mill in Chinese art. Extant Song and earlier texts recount that the water mill first became a subject of painting in the tenth century, especially through the work of Guo Zhongshu and Wei Xian (active ca. 960-75). Li Zhi once saw Guo's The Great Water Mill (Shuimo datu) with a cartoon of freight carts, both dated 934.(n14) Unfortunately, Li Zhi did not say what Guo's water mill looked like or why he had painted it. Wei Xian, to whom the Shanghai Water Mill was formerly attributed, acquired instant fame when the last Southern Tang sovereign Li Yu (r. 961-75) inscribed two poems on a painting by him. Two eleventh-century biographies of Wei Xian commend the artist for his achievement in painting architectural subjects, noting water mills and freight carts among his specialties.(n15) In these accounts, the conjunction of water mills and freight carts in the work of both artists is striking. Although these paintings by Guo Zhongshu and Wei Xian have long been lost, the genre they established seems to have provided the iconographic and stylistic model for the painting of the Shanghai Water Mill.

The water mill featured in the Shanghai scroll (Fig. 1) is flanked symmetrically by a thatched pavilion on either side, each open to a spacious terrace. The upper compartments of the mill contain, in the center, the main millstones and, to the right, a reciprocator working a flour sifter, each of them powered by a horizontal waterwheel (Fig. 4). Surrounding the mill are some forty laborers at work. The sequence of the milling operation parallels the unfolding and reading of the handscroll. As the scroll unfolds from the right, the viewer follows first the ferry across the river and then the water carrier up the stairway into the right terrace, where the newly harvested raw wheat is being winnowed from the chaff through two suspended sieves. The winnowed wheat is washed and then carried to the mill for grinding and sifting by two horizontal waterwheels underneath. The processed flour is taken to the left terrace to be sun dried. Finally, the finished flour is bagged, shipped by ferry across the water, and loaded onto the carts in the lower left foreground. The fully loaded carts are seen crossing a bridge and disappearing one by one behind the hill. Looking at the bustling human activity, the viewer can almost hear the moving freight carts, the rushing water that powers the wheels, the grinding millstones, and workers shouting back and forth. Next to the mill in the lower right corner is a wineshop, where the viewer is welcome to share a restful moment with travelers, ox-cart drivers, and mill workers taking a break.

As might be expected, The Water Mill presents a well-ordered composition. Wineshop and mill form a strong corner-to-corner diagonal from lower right to upper left. The diagonal, like an invisible force, creates a movement of temporary progress and spatial recession that delineates the milling process from the winnowing of wheat to the bagging of flour. It may also imply a social hierarchy, with common laborers in the foreground, skilled workers in the middle by the mill, and official supervisors presiding over the operation from above.(n16) The sequence of processing events--wheat coming in from one side, flour going out through the other--is so efficiently designed that it forms a production line. The architectural enclosures of the mill, pavilions, terrace embankments, and wineshop are juxtaposed with the open spaces of water, terrace grounds, and the welcoming gate to form alternating solids and voids. Strong diagonal lines, drawn according to the principles of Chinese "parallel perspective," or axonometric drawing,(n17) intersect all architectural structures with emphasis on the railings of the terraces, the roof ridges of the wineshop and mill, and the timberwork of the welcoming gate to create both an illusion of depth and a clarity of design. The harmonious combination of diagonals, verticals, and horizontals produces an effect of solidity and permanence. Both style and content of the painting convey a sense of purposefulness.

The Water Mill is among the best-documented surviving early Chinese paintings, thanks to Zheng Wei's thorough identification of the thirteen collectors' seals found on the scroll.(n18) The earliest seals are the four placed on the borders between the painting and the succeeding scroll mounting. These seals are part of the set of seven seals forming the unique mounting pattern used for Huizong's collection of painting and calligraphy, conventionally known as the Xuanhe zhuang.(n19) The painting bears no inscription except for a half-cut-off signature, which reads "Wei Xian gong hui," or "Respectfully drawn by Wei Xian," at the lower left corner of the painting.(n20) Wei Xian was a well-known jiehua painter with a minor official title active in the last Southern Tang court, a relatively small yet culturally sophisticated kingdom in southeast China that was forced to surrender in 975 when the Northern Song armies brought its capital under siege. Wei Xian's authorship of the Shanghai Water Mill was generally accepted by art historians until 1978, when an incomplete and supposedly earlier signature of a painter with the family name Zhang was observed during the remounting of the scroll.(n21) The "Zhang" in question has not been identified. However, the authentic Xuanhe zhuang seals on the scroll firmly date the painting to before the early twelfth century and preserve the state of the composition since that time.(n22) While most scholars agree that the style of The Water Mill is typical of the early Northern Song court, datable to the late tenth to early eleventh century,(n23) many fundamental questions remain. It has always been puzzling why and how the humble water mill, an ancient machine of hydraulic engineering, became a subject of Northern Song court painting, since the primary art patrons and critics were still emperors, aristocrats, and scholar-officials.

As a masterpiece of jiehua painting, The Water Mill exhibits the painter's technical skill in mathematical calculation, clarity in architectural description, and legibility in mechanical engineering. But however visually convincing, representation alone was never a sufficient purpose of Song academy painting.(n24) The painting was not simply the serendipitous creation of a court painter nor a fortuitous concoction of the painter and his patron. Rather, it was the result of a process of the imperialization of commerce and science. The present study will examine the Northern Song emperors' patronage of water mills and other innovations of hydraulic engineering. It will relate the making of The Water Mill to such patronage in conjunction with the establishment of new state institutions, which may be suggestive of an approximate date for the scroll. The study will also investigate the policy struggle over the government's involvement in commercial markets and explore the impact of new technological developments brought about by the economic changes on both art and ideology. In the eyes of the social and cultural elite, the water mill became at this time a metaphoric embodiment of the efficiency and benevolence of good government. My interpretation of The Water Mill is based primarily on Song sources, intended to offer a historical context for a masterpiece of jiehua that so far has not been adequately explained. To do so, I will focus on the interaction of art, commerce, science, and technology, an important yet neglected aspect of the study of Chinese painting.(n25)

The Northern Song art of jiehua developed side by side with the Northern Song economy, science, and technology as part of China's first commercial revolution, which took place from the tenth to the fourteenth century. This revolution was marked by advances in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, metallurgy, and mechanical engineering, together with discoveries in farming, water transport, money and credit, and urbanization. The cumulative effect of all these improvements made the Northern Song economy the most advanced in the world.(n26) Among the factors contributing to the economic prosperity were government incentives, imperial sponsorship, and sometimes, the involvement of the state.(n27) The Water Mill illustrates the state's direct engagement in the thriving milling industry and its related commercial activities. Most conspicuous among the workers is a man seated in front of a desk inside a thatched pavilion in the upper left corner of the painting (Fig. 5). Depicted in three-quarter view(n28) and dressed in full court attire, he wears the distinctive black hat known as pingjiao futou (literally, "hat with two horizontal legs"), the formally designated court hat worn exclusively by the Song emperor and courtiers on official occasions.(n29) This iconographic detail can be confirmed by a portrait of the Northern Song founder Taizu (r. 960-76, Fig. 6).(n30) Another official of slightly lower rank who wears a dark robe and the same "hat with two horizontal legs" approaches the seated official. Behind the seated official stand three attendants in simpler dress. The two officials, unmistakably supervisors of the milling operation, seem to be engaged in bookkeeping, recording, and evaluating the product of the mill. The empty thatched pavilion on the other side of the mill seems to be an alternative on-site office for them. The presence of these officials clearly indicates that the government owns and operates the mill.

The involvement of the state can be further linked to another commercial enterprise depicted in the lower right corner of the scroll: a wineshop across the river from the mill (Fig. 7). A handsome building, it has a barely legible signboard at its entrance reading "New Wine [xinjiu]," which confirms that the painting shows the harvest season.(n31) Wineshops of Northern Song times could be easily recognized by their distinct architecture and trade signs. All wineshops in the capital, Kaifeng, had decorated, multistoried welcoming gates, according to the 1147 nostalgic reminiscences of Meng Yuanlao (ca. 1090-1150), who lived in the capital until 1126, when the city was sacked by the invading Jurchen armies.(n32) These canopied structures were made of timber or bamboo scaffolding. The welcoming gate in the Shanghai scroll has a solid footing of four thick, tall pillars. Its towering height and the inclusion of a large, striped trade banner with the large character "Wine" (jiu) on it make the function of the welcoming gate self-evident: to mark the entrance of the wineshop and to draw in customers.

The wineshop entrance is not wide open but blocked by an elaborate xingma, or horse barricade, made of vertical and horizontal timbers topped with brackets and a gabled roof. This seemingly ordinary-looking barricade has in fact an extraordinary origin, as pointed out by Cheng Dachang (1123-1195), a late twelfth-century minister of personnel with encyclopedic interests:

From Jin [265-420] and [Northern] Wei [368-534] times on, when officials achieved distinctive high ranks, they would be honored with the installation of xingma at the entrances of their agencies and residences.... Such barricades are now called chazi and installed in front of government agencies [generally].(n33)

Thus, these horse barricades represented a mark of official rank. The wineshop of The Water Mill has acquired the prestige originally reserved for distinguished government officials. This change occurred in the mid-tenth century. When the city of Kaifeng was preparing to welcome the grand tour of a Five Dynasties emperor,(n34) it was ordered that horse barricades be installed at the entrances to all wineshops, teahouses, and other commercial sites. The practice persisted, and the horse barricade, as an insignia of honor, became an index of increasing prosperity and the government sanction of commerce. A closer look into the foreshortened entrance of the wineshop behind the horse barricade reveals a half-hidden male figure, either a customer or shop servant. Although the figure is on his way out, the opened door reveals a passage into the hidden interior and serves as a link between the outdoor activities and a party of officials drinking upstairs in an open pavilion. Such a scene may appear to be casual or accidental but is in fact a calculated and distinct device of Northern Song court art that draws the viewer into the interior and engages him with the activities shown there.(n35)

The Northern Song government held a strict monopoly in both the production and sale of wine and liquor and guarded the lucrative business jealously. In the years from 961 to 967, Taizu issued several decrees to impose increasingly heavy punishments, including the capital penalty, on violations of monopoly.(n36) In the Northern Song this monopoly was administered through three imperial wineries in the capital and an elaborate network of wine agencies (jiuwu) outside the capital: the Legal Winery (Fajiuku), which produced wine for imperial events; the Inner Winery (Neijiufang), which produced wine for court uses; and the Chief Fermentation Bureau (Duquyuan), which produced distiller's yeast, restricting its sale for imperial and private uses.(n37) Wine production and sales outside the capital fell under the supervision of the Chief Wine Agency (Dujiuwu) through its numerous regional and local agencies. The wine agency was a winery-wineshop that produced and sold its own wine and had jurisdiction over a number of smaller wineshops. The government also granted franchises to private persons.(n38) This background tells us that the wineshop in the Shanghai scroll, like the nearby water mill, is either a government-owned operation or a franchise farmed out by the government to a private person. The presence of several government officials on the upper floor, marked by their red robes and "hats with two horizontal legs," seems to underline the wineshop's official status. Thus, the water mill and the wineshop could have been partners on three levels: both are state-owned properties; the same wheat is used for processing flour and brewing liquor; and both are operated to produce revenue for the government.

To maintain a population of more than one million in the capital city with an imperial army of two hundred thousand soldiers permanently stationed in the vicinity, a national market economy was established, with Kaifeng at its center, to raise the necessary revenue.(n39) The early Song emperors, as the greatest patrons of the economy and the greatest consumers of its revenue, actively engaged themselves in this enterprise. By the late tenth century water mills had been in use in China for more than a thousand years,(n40) but never had they been owned by the state before the Northern Song. To understand why and how the Northern Song government began to acquire water mills, it will help to look into the commissioning of several water mill agencies (shuimowu) by the Northern Song founder Taizu. The Song huiyao, a collection of Song state administrative documents, gives a lucid account of these events in Kaifeng:

These water mill agencies each operated a mill, making flour for the Food Services Bureau of the imperial palaces as well as for other residents of the capital city. There were two agencies of the East and West [Water Mills]. The East Agency was located in the ward of Yongshun and the West Agency in the ward of Jiaqing. Both were set up in 970, each managed by two supervisory officials selected from the eunuchs (neishi) of the Court of Palace Attendants and manned by a total of 205 workers.(n41)

That two officials can be seen inside the thatched pavilion in The Water Mill may be a coincidence, but these two figures could be the eunuch supervisors dressed in the attire of their official appointment, for the coded dress served as an insignia to inform the viewer of a particular rank.(n42) In 990 a third water mill agency, the Datongmen Agency, was set up with one supervisory official and twenty-nine workers. In the following years three more water mill agencies were established some forty miles west of Kaifeng in the city of Zhengzhou to provide further services to the court.(n43)

Four rivers flowing into the capital city provided rich resources for milling (Fig. 8). The Bian, as the northern section of the Grand Canal, connected Kaifeng with the Jiangnan region in the southeast and with the secondary capital Luoyang (via the Yellow River) in the west; it was the dynastic artery of commerce and economy.(n44) The availability of abundant water and the advancement of hydraulic engineering made milling an increasingly profitable industry toward the late tenth century, and the state was determined to take the lion's share of the revenue. The commissioning of the water mill agencies reveals an intense competition between the state and private mill owners for control of the available water. Thus, the water mill agency as a state institution had a threefold purpose: to operate commercial water mills; to exhibit the imperial patronage of science and technology; and to exert bureaucratic control over the growing and profitable industry.

Imperial patronage was vital to the success and proliferation of milling, as in all public agrarian projects in the history of China. For instance, in the late fifth century the second Qi emperor Wudi (r. 483-93) made an inspection of a new water mill built by the noted mathematician and engineer Zu Chongzhi (429-500) in the imperial park Leyouyuan.(n45) This and earlier occasions of similar imperial engagement may have set exemplary precedents for the two brother-founders of the Northern Song dynasty, Taizu and Taizong (r. 976-97). Taizu made his first visit to the West Water Mill in the capital city in the autumn of 965,(n46) and five years later in 970 he established the West and East Water Mill Agencies. The imperial visit in 965 must have been a major contributing factor to the creation of the first two water mill agencies, as imperial visits often initiated new imperial projects.(n47) Taizu made three visits to the two water mill agencies in 974 and another in 976.(n48) In the last quarter of the tenth century, the unprecedented imperial favors of Taizong furthered the importance and prosperity of milling. In 977 alone, he made four visits to water mills in the vicinity of the capital, and he rewarded the workers of one of these with clothes and silk brocades. He visited a water mill twice more, in 980 and 993.(n49) Immediately after their visits to the mills, both emperors attended archery banquets at imperial parks.(n50) Illustrations of similar imperial events in the eleventh century include Imperial Archery Banquet at the North Camp (Fig. 9) and Imperial Inspection of the Bian Flood Control (Fig. 10), two sections from the scroll Four Events of the Jingde Era (1004-7), probably made to commemorate the life of Taizong's son and successor, Zhenzong (r. 998-1022).(n51) A colophon accompanying the latter section dates the event to 1006 and relates that the laborers who worked all night to save the dikes were personally rewarded with presents of money by the emperor, while those who were drowned in action were buried at public expense.(n52) The abbreviated and schematic style in rendering architecture, landscape, and human figures may have resulted from the fact that the illustrations were originally intended to be drawings for woodblock prints.(n53) The two emperors also enjoyed watching fish during their visits to the water mills.(n54) The availability of a fish tank or reservoir for the emperor's relaxation shows the refinement of these milling facilities. In the Shanghai scroll, a body of water in front of the water mill is enclosed by the two projecting terraces (Fig. 1), which, with its running water and rich supply of wheat and flour as food, makes a perfect home for fish. Behind the railing of the high terraces are ideal spots for fish watching.

The imperial patronage of the water mill in the early decades of the dynasty indicated the founding emperors' efforts to raise the money needed for the security and prosperity of the new empire. These eleven imperial visits to water mills, along with such visits to shipbuilding yards, military exercises, palace libraries and workshops, and flood control and irrigation projects, and together with the more formal official audiences and ceremonial visits to temples, constituted the daily duties of the emperor as the Son of Heaven and conferred the imperial sanction on the most important government institutions. These visits brought in the emperor's train hundreds or thousands of courtiers participating in processions, forming spectacular public displays of imperial wealth and power. Authorities staged such displays as "political theatre," in Patricia Ebrey's analysis, "to dazzle an audience, gain its support, and impress upon it a vision of the social and political order."(n55) Their ceremonial character was commemorated in textual records and painted scrolls that formed an integral part of Northern Song political and visual culture. For example, two monumental scroll paintings, Auspicious Imperial Audiences at the Feng and Shan Sacrifices (Feng Shan chaojin xiangrui tu) and Procession of Welcoming the Heavenly Texts (Tianshu yizhang tu), were presented to the throne in late 1009 to honor the most spectacular imperial display of the Northern Song,(n56) the feng and shah sacrifices performed by Emperor Zhenzong in 1008, responding to the appearance of the auspicious omens of two "heavenly texts" earlier in the same year.(n57) Unfortunately, neither of the two paintings survives.(n58)

Given the importance accorded the imperial patronage of water mills by Taizu and Taizong and the Northern Song court practice of commissioning commemorative scrolls, The Water Mill may well have been painted as a visual record. The two emperors concentrated their attention on water mills during the decade of the 970s; the mid-decade was marked by four visits by Taizu and another four by Taizong. The mid-970s carried art historical significance as well. When Taizu defeated the Southern Tang court in 975, he seized much of the royal art collection of the conquered state and amalgamated it with his own collection. The emperor also summoned the best court artists of the conquered state to Kaifeng to join his Imperial Painting Academy, which was to become the center of imperial production throughout the dynasty.(n59) By 975, Wei Xian, the Southern Tang master of architectural painting (to whom The Water Mill was once attributed), apparently had already died, but surely he had colleagues and followers who responded to the Northern Song emperor's invitation to join his court. Taizong possibly commissioned one of these masters to paint The Water Mill.(n60) A state operation supported by state funds, the water mill depicted in the Shanghai scroll may have been one of the new mills visited by Taizu and/or Taizong in the 970s. Although further evidence is needed to determine the date of the painting, the decade of the 970s is historically possible and art historically probable. The highly rationalized style of The Water Mill and the description of government officials point to the court as the sponsor of water mill pictures and the emperor's personal interests as the main driving force behind such production.(n61)

There is, however, another possibility: the Shanghai Water Mill might have been commissioned by an interested private party. The late tenth century saw the rise of merchants as competitive art patrons and collectors.(n62) A well-documented case was the magnate Sun Sihao (d. ca. 983), owner of a magnificent wineshop in the capital, father of one of Taizong's concubines, and patron of some of the most eminent artists in and outside the academy.(n63) Sun's motives for art patronage can be likened to those of the fifteenth-century Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai, as defined by Michael Baxandall: "The pleasure of possession, an active piety, civic consciousness of one or another kind, self-commemoration and perhaps self-advertisement, the rich man's necessary virtue and pleasure of reparation, a taste for pictures."(n64) Liu Daochun once saw a painting called The Water Mill with Freight Carts (Pangche shuimo tu) by Wei Xian in the house of a rich merchant named Gao.(n65) The same merchant Gao also owned a scroll depicting commercial ships sailing on the sea painted by the academy jiehua artist Yan Wengui (active 980-1010).(n66) Although it is not clear what Gao traded in, the fact that he collected paintings of a water mill and commercial ships by some of the best-known artists of his day may well indicate that the rich merchant was engaged in milling and/or commercial shipping. The pictures he commissioned and collected, then, would not only have a market value as collectibles but also signify the collector's taste, social status, and ownership of both of the properties and the pictures of those properties. Above all, it suggests the power of the rising merchant class in early Northern Song society.

As a highly lucrative industry, milling occasioned many hard-fought battles between the state and individuals. The water mill came to personify the ideal Confucian government of efficiency and benevolence as a consequence of these fights. In retrospect, the two founding Northern Song emperors' frequent visits implied the existence of political opposition to state involvement in commerce. This is confirmed by the history of the water mill agencies in the eleventh century. Writing his father's obituary in 1048, Liu Chang (1019-1068), jinshi of 1046 and a scholar of the Imperial Academy of Worthies (Jixianyuan), mentioned the following among his father's accomplishments:

Emperor Taizu established [in 970] the East and West Water Mill [Agencies] to provide supplies for the imperial palaces. In the course of decades the two water mill [agencies] gradually fell out of order and out of use. Flour needed for the imperial kitchens had to be bought in the common market. Some corrupt officials took advantage [of these transactions] to extort money, which disgusted all the private mill owners in and outside the capital city. fin 1046] my father restored the two old mills to their original function, thus putting an end to the extortion of those corrupt officials.(n67)

The son was proud of his father's restoration of the state-run water mills in a struggle against official corruption. Although the 1046 restoration lasted only until about 1080,(n68) milling, whether under government control or in private hands, continued to be a booming industry throughout the period. As part of the state policy to raise revenue, the government imposed heavy taxes on private flour milling and adopted stringent regulations for any sale of flour by private mill owners. The flour sales (including cooked products) in both the East and the West Markets of the capital city came under the government's strict control. An imperial decree issued in 1079 offers a glimpse of the severe penalty for violation: "If dealers and mill owners dare to make private flour transactions, they will be flogged a hundred times as punishment. Information leading to the conviction of anyone selling flour illegally will be rewarded: for five catties [of flour] and above with three thousand cash, for ten catties and above with ten thousand."(n69)

Some water mills specialized in processing raw tea leaves into powder to make tea cakes (chabing--dried powdered tea in the form of a cake) for market. Because tea milling was more profitable than flour milling, it caused even more acute tensions between public and private interests. In 1080 the state decided to take the lion's share of tea milling by operating its own mills on the rivers in the capital and its environs.(n70) In the spring of 1086 the water of the Bian River reached a level so low that a choice had to be made between shutting down either the state or the private mills in order to maintain the passage of the tax grain barges on the river. The conflict between public and private ownership led to heated court debate. On one occasion, Vice Minister of Revenue Li Ding (1028-1087) defended the state operation by citing its annual revenue of 400,000 strings of cash.(n71) The Right Remonstrator Su Zhe (1039-1112, jinshi 1057) criticized Li's position, as it sacrificed the emperor's moral reputation for monetary profit. He proposed closing down all state mills and leaving the whole business to private millers.(n72) The Li-Su debate reflected a struggle between the two approaches to government in the wake of Wang Anshi's New Policies reform throughout the reign of Shenzong (r. 1068-85).(n73) Li Ding held to the New Policies' vision of an activist government that would restore the state as the dominant player in the commercial economy. Su Zhe fought for a more limited government, opposing the state's active economic involvement at the cost of private interests. As the main goal of the New Policies was to raise revenue to resolve the government's constant fiscal crisis, at bottom the 1086 Li-Su court debate on milling, like the 970 imperial establishment of the water mill agencies, concerned money. Su Zhe's argument initially held sway, but in 1094 the state operation resumed, and it was expanded with 260 new water mills outside the capital area. In 1106 the state made another attempt to shut down the entire private tea-milling operation on the Bian, but its efforts were not always successful. Contests between the state and private capital to control the water mills continued along with the development of the state-driven economy throughout the period.(n74)

Contemporary private writings provide abundant reflections of the court politics of water milling. For example, the noted scholar-official, poet, and painter Wen Tong (1018-1079, jinshi 1049) drew on his personal experience as an official in the Shu region when he wrote the sympathetic poem "The Water Mill [Shuiwei]"(n75) for a private mill owner he once visited:

A water mill is built into the river rapids by a man of Jialing, Its high structure and deep foundations proclaim his hard labor; Folks in the neighborhood ten li(n76) around all come here to share milling, Wheat comes in, flour goes out, one after another without ceasing. Despite toil and risk, the owner earns only a thin profit, For generations his family has made its living by the riverbank; Now the Sovereign is sending his men to supervise water conservancy, Alas, what will the fate of these horizontal and vertical water wheels be?

Wen Tong's sympathy with the private mill owner reveals his reservations about the government's intervention in controlling water resources, a view he shared with the opponents of the New Policies reform.

In the tenth century, the water mill depicted in the Shanghai scroll would have been seen as an advanced machine of hydraulic engineering. As Mark Elvin points out, it is impossible to understand the economic history of China without an understanding of hydrology and hydraulics.(n77) The period of the Northern Song was fertile in scientific advances and technological innovations, in hydraulic engineering in particular, as research in science and technology was backed and financed by the government.

The eleven imperial water mill visits testify to the Northern Song founders' keen interest in the science of hydraulic engineering. Taizu and Taizong, however, were not the only two Northern Song emperors with scientific interests, nor was the water mill the only advanced hydraulic machine of the time. The hydraulic astronomical clock also benefited from Northern Song imperial patronage. The development of hydraulic astronomical clocks in China parallels that of water mills. Joseph Needham and his associates have suggested the first century C.E. or even earlier as the date for the Chinese use of water mills and identified the great Han mathematician and engineer Zhang Heng (78-142) as the inventor of the water-powered mechanized astronomical clock.(n78) The first Song water-powered mechanized astronomical clock was designed by the little-known Sichuanese Zhang Sixun in 976 and completed under the auspices of Taizong in 977. "His Majesty then ordered it to be erected under the Eastern Drum Tower of the Daming Hall with a plaque written by the imperial hand, reading 'The Astronomical Clock of Supreme Peace' [Taiping hunyi]," as the late Northern Song imperial engineer Su Song (1020-1101, jinshi 1042) recalled.(n79) Sixun was rewarded with an imperial appointment as assistant of the Astronomical Bureau.

Su Song supervised the design and construction of the second astronomical clock, even larger and more advanced than the first, commissioned in 1086 by the newly enthroned emperor Zhezong (r. 1086-1100). On an earlier diplomatic mission to the Khitan Liao (907-1125,in modern Mongolia), Song China's longtime neighbor and rival in the north, Su discovered that the Chinese calendar was not as accurate as their nomad neighbor's.(n80) Zhezong's patronage of Su Song's astronomical clock seems to have been clearly aimed at competing with the Khitan Liao for scientific and national superiority. Su Song's construction of the new astronomical clock began in 1088, and two years later the completed clock provided the court with a spectacle of hydraulic engineering.

Neither of the two Northern Song astronomical clocks survives today. Fortunately, Su Song's designs have been preserved in his illustrated treatise New Design for an Astronomical Clock Tower (Xin yixiang fayao). The clock is a tower topped by an armillary sphere and celestial globe of mechanical and hydraulic engineering, about thirty-five feet high (Fig. 11).(n81) Figure 11 offers a general view of the clock's interior structure, whose mechanism is explained by Needham's reconstruction (Fig. 12) based on Su Song's treatise.(n82) John Christiansen's 1956 reconstruction of Su Song's work (Fig. 13) has helped to make the eleventh-century Chinese astronomical clock well known in the West as a marvel of ancient engineering.(n83)

The ancient Chinese rulers always considered astronomy a science of cardinal importance; early texts contain abundant records of imperial patronage of astronomical studies.(n84) The astronomical clock served not only to regularly imitate the natural motion of the sun and the heavens but also to prognosticate state affairs. Its mechanical structure conveys implications of imperial symbolism in the use of such symbolic terms as the Pond of Heaven (tianci) for the upper water reservoir (42; numbers refers to numbered parts in Needham's reconstruction, Fig. 12), the Pillar of Heaven (tianzhu) for the main vertical transmission shaft (38), the Orbit of Heaven (tianjing) for the split-ring meridian circle (13), the Wheel of Heaven (tianlun) for the oblique gear wheel (18) above the Platform of Heaven (tianshu) for the two upper bearing beams (17), the Pole of Earth (diji) for the lower bearing beam (58), and the Feet of Earth (dizu) for the two supporting stands (61).(n85) Su Song explained this symbolism explicitly in his presentation of the new astronomical clock to Emperor Zhezong in 1090:

According to your servant's [that is, Su Song's] opinion there have been many systems and designs for astronomical instruments during past dynasties all differing from one another in minor respects. But the principle of the use of water-power for the driving mechanism has always been the same. The heavens move without ceasing and so also does water flow [and fall]. Thus if the water is made to pour with perfect evenness then the comparison of the rotary movements [of the heavens and the machine] will show no discrepancy or contradiction; for the unresting follows the unceasing.(n86)

In making the parallel between the movements of the heavens and the flow of the water, Su Song consciously points to the connection between hydraulic power and imperial power. The unresting movements of the heavens and the water correspond to the unceasing power of the hydraulic machine and, by extension, to the unceasing power of the emperor. Political symbolism of this sort explains why the hydraulic astronomical clock was one of the several mechanical devices included in major imperial processions on a floatlike vehicle, as depicted in the 1053 Illustration of the Imperial Grand Carriage Procession.(n87)

The astronomical clocks of Zhang Sixun and Su Song are relevant and necessary to the understanding of the Shanghai Water Mill because of the political symbolism shared by all three hydraulic machines. When Taizong and Zhezong commissioned the astronomical clocks respectively in 976 and 1086, each of them understood the profound political kinship between his mandate as the Son of Heaven and astronomy and hydraulic engineering as sciences of Heaven and Earth. In this way, the astronomical clock and the water mill became two different embodiments of the same emperorship in science. The Northern Song imperial patronage of science culminated in the official opening of the institutes of astronomy and mathematics in 1104.(n88)

In his 1966 study of the Shanghai Water Mill, Zheng Wei included two drawings of the mechanism of the water mill based on the painting (Fig. 14). One illustrates an upper-level millstone powered by a lower-level horizontal waterwheel; the other describes a water-powered reciprocator working a flour sifter to the right of the central flour mill.(n89) A comparison of these drawings with Needham's reconstruction of Su Song's clockwork mechanism (Fig. 12) reveals that the unidentified painter of the Shanghai Water Mill had a firm knowledge of engineering, although not as advanced or complex as Su Song's. The unknown painter, while probably not an imperial engineer like Su Song, may have played the role of an imperial architect, like other architectural painters in the Northern Song court.

The sophisticated understanding of hydraulic engineering exhibited in the Shanghai Water Mill becomes more impressive when the painting is compared with the anonymous fourteenth-century Water Mill in a Mountain Valley (Fig. 15), now in the Liaoning Provincial Museum.(n90) The later painting closely resembles the earlier in both the depiction of the mill and the inclusion of the freight carts in the foreground. However, two differences immediately present themselves: the setting has been transformed from suburban to rural with the addition of an elaborate landscape, and the mill ownership was changed from the state to a Buddhist monastery through the substitution of two monks standing by a stream in the left foreground of the mill for the two officials seated inside the thatched pavilion. A closer examination of this later water mill (Fig. 16) reveals a problematic structure. Needham thought that mechanical inaccuracies in rendering the mechanism of the Liaoning water mill, such as the badly drawn gear wheels, the confusion of paddle wheels with gear wheels, and the general lack of clarity, resulted from drawing from memory instead of from life.(n91) Had he realized that the Liaoning water mill was a poor imitation of the Shanghai scroll, he would have recognized that the inaccuracies were caused by the fourteenth-century painter's failure to understand the mechanism of the mill that had been fully comprehended by the Song painter. James Cahill characterizes the intellectual principle of Northern Song painting as "an exploratory mode," which encourages elaborate and profound visual exploration of depicted spaces as "a pictorial counterpart to the systematic investigation of the physical world."(n92) He reads the lack of clear visual information in the Liaoning Water Mill as a "loss in the Chinese painter's involvement in the project of describing or exploring the physical world," corresponding to China's disengagement from technological innovation in the post-Song period.(n93)

The difference between the Shanghai and the Liaoning water mills points to a gradual decline of interest in science and technology on the painter's part from the fourteenth century on. Such a decline has also been inferred from the ranking of architectural painting in later critical texts. For instance, in the 1120 Xuanhe Catalogue, architectural painting is ranked third of the ten subject categories--below only religious subjects and didactic human figures--because of the importance of architecture in human life and the difficulty in painting it.(n94) With further specialization in the thirteenth century, the number of subject categories was expanded to thirteen but the ranking of architectural painting dropped drastically. Writing in 1328, the noted Yuan critic Tang Hou (ca. 1262-ca. 1331) explained the consequences of the decline with regret:

In discussing painting, people nowadays often say that it has thirteen categories, with landscape at the top and jiehua at the bottom. For this reason people [wrongly] regard architectural painting as the easiest to do. They are unaware that even carpenters and artisans are not able to exhaust the subtle aspects of high and low or looking down and up, square and circular or crooked and straight, distant and near or convex and concave, sharp and dull or refined and rough. All the more so, then, is it extremely difficult to convey one's thoughts onto silk or paper with brush and ink, compass and ruler, while seeking to adhere to the rules and standards....(n95)

The fourteenth-century ranking of architectural painting at the bottom of the hierarchy reflects a changing ideology that regarded science and exploration of the natural world of less importance. This partly explains why the Yuan water mill fails to match its Northern Song model in terms of mechanical engineering. The author of the Liaoning Water Mill might be a good painter in his own right, but evidently, since he could not explain the mechanism of the mill accurately, he was not an architect or engineer. In short, the difference between the Shanghai Water Mill and the Liaoning Water Mill is not just a matter of style but, more important, a matter of ideology.

The architecture of the water mill in the Shanghai scroll follows the style of Northern Song imperial architecture, which is closely related to contemporary architectural manuals compiled under the same imperial patronage.(n96) A surviving example of such architecture is the Moni Hall (Fig. 17) of the Buddhist monastery Longxingsi, completed and dedicated to the historical Buddha Shakyamuni in 1052.(n97) The water mill of the Shanghai scroll bears strong stylistic similarities to the Moni Hall. The double-storied structure has the same hip-and-gable roof and the same nearly square plan; on either side are similar projecting gabled porches. Although the rear of the water mill is hidden, the half-visible vertical ridge crossed with the main horizontal ridge at the center top of the roof indicates the existence of another gabled porch behind. The extension of the flanking terraces shapes a clear frontal entrance, which, at least in formal terms, fills the same function as Moni Hall's front porch. Interestingly, the front of the mill has a gabled roof seen above the upper compartment, though reduced and abbreviated to serve a merely decorative purpose, strongly reminding the viewer of its structural origin. When the Chinese architect and architectural historian Liang Sicheng (1901-1972) first saw the Moni Hall in 1933, he exclaimed that it "could only have been seen in Song painting."(n98) Liang observed that many prominent components of the architecture, including every strut, brace, and bracket set, were consistent with the proportions stated in the 1100 imperial architectural manual Yingzao fashi compiled by the imperial architect Li Jie (1035-1110).(n99)

Yingzao fashi is the later and more important of the two Northern Song architectural manuals. The earlier one, the Mu jing (Book of timberwork) by the late tenth-century architect Yu Hao, was contemporaneous with the first water mill agencies and possibly with the painting of the Shanghai Water Mill. As the manual has long been lost, modern knowledge of it depends entirely on a descriptive account given by Shen Gua (1031-1095, jinshi 1063), a leading Northern Song scholar-official, especially in the scientific world of his time, which ends, "In recent years carpenters and masons have become more and more precise and skillful, and the old Mu jing has mostly fallen out of date. But there has not been anyone writing a new book yet."(n100) Shen apparently did not realize that the imperial sponsorship of the monumental Yingzao fashi was already under way. The compilation of Yingzao fashi took some thirty years, under the sponsorship of three emperors. Shenzong had initiated it as one of many imperial undertakings during the New Policies reform, and its first draft was finished in 1091. In 1097 Zhezong, the same emperor who commissioned Su Song's astronomical clock about a decade before, commanded the imperial architect Li Jie to compile an up-to-date and more comprehensive version of Yingzao fashi.(n101) The new manual was completed and presented to the throne in 1100 and finally printed for distribution under the imperial auspices of Huizong in 1103.(n102) Of the thirty-four chapters in Yingzao fashi, the last five, grouped as "Designs and Cartoons [Tuyang]," constitute a rich repertoire of drawings of architectural parts and designs of human figures, animals, birds and flowers, and geometric patterns for decorations on walls and woodwork.(n103) Among them are two horse-barricade illustrations (Fig. 18), known as juma chazi (a variant of xingma and chazi),(n104) which are reminiscent of the horse barricade depicted in the Shanghai Water Mill (Fig. 8). Needham regards the inclusion of many illustrations of structural components and decorative designs in the last five chapters of the manual as a monumental landmark in the history of world science and technology, for "we can at last almost speak of working drawings in a modern sense--perhaps for the first time in any civilization."(n105)

The Water Mill, in the accuracy of the water mill's mechanism and the clarity of the wineshop gate, seems to illustrate this type of almost modern working drawing. It has also been described in the biographies of Guo Zhongshu and Wei Xian. With such extraordinary specialized skill at their command, academy jiehua masters sometimes played the role of imperial architects in creating designs for actual construction. Contemporary art historical texts recount stories of their success. For example, when the construction of the Daoist Temple of Jade Purity was being planned in 1008, two designs submitted by Lü Zhuo and Liu Wentong were approved by Emperor Zhenzong, and builders were ordered to use them for construction; both artists were rewarded with promotion in the academy.(n106)

The work of Lü Zhuo and Liu Wentong has long been lost, but the example of the contemporary Shanghai Water Mill can perhaps be taken as a measure of their skill. The depiction of the welcoming gate (Fig. 7), as noted above, gives the information of a working drawing. A comparison with another remarkable gate, from the famous handscroll Qingming shanghe tu (popularly rendered as Qingming Festival on the River), painted by the mysterious Zhang Zeduan probably toward the end of the eleventh century (Fig. 19),(n107) shows us two different styles in Northern Song jiehua painting.(n108) The painter of the Shanghai scroll relied completely on the tools of ruler, square, and straightedge. He drew every line evenly and consistently and aimed for accuracy in drawing every line and in every calculation. Every relation of one plank to another and their ties can be clearly seen. The painter rendered all parts of the architecture faithfully in what is almost a blueprint, as if he knew that his drawing would be used for the actual construction of the gate. Unlike the Water Mill painter, Zhang Zeduan relies only partly on his tools, drawing the four corner posts freehand. His drawing is accurate but uneven, producing thick and thin, light and dark impressionistic lines. It gives the general effect of liveliness, but at the cost of clarity. Zhang's drawing seems to be geared to communicating more the welcome gate's function of attracting fast-moving urban passersby than to being used for construction. Yet both artists were jiehua masters; their different approaches and mentalities may have resulted from the different times they lived in, about a century apart.

The Qingming scroll may well be considered the swan song of the great tradition of Northern Song jiehua painting. Zhang Zeduan's skills as a painter-architect can be seen in the "Rainbow Bridge" scene of the Qingming scroll (Fig. 20). The span of the bridge over the river in the scroll has recently been calculated as about eighty-two feet long, twenty-six feet wide, and twenty feet high from the water level.(n109) The engineering of the bridge is classified by Needham as the multiangular, soaring cantilever type, which was most efficient because it obviated the necessity for central piers, obstacles particularly liable to flood damage and to block moving ships.(n110) Thus, the rainbow bridge, like the water mill depicted in the Shanghai scroll, stands not only for a technological achievement but also for a practical solution to the problems of a state-driven economy.(n111)

Lü Zhuo, Liu Wentong, the anonymous painter of The Water Mill, and Zhang Zeduan were all jiehua masters, belonging to the tradition of Wei Xian and Guo Zhongshu. Their mastery of drawing and accuracy in execution were "perfect" because they became architects themselves. In this light, the Shanghai scroll could have been related to a water mill design for a real water mill. It is no coincidence that The Water Mill, the Moni Hall, and the Yingzao fashi manual share stylistic features, because they were all the work of Northern Song jiehua masters and architects at court.

The above examination of the aspects of style, patronage, architecture, and science and technology in the making of The Water Mill produces reliable clues for a profile of the unidentified author of the painting: he was a jiehua master or, more precisely, a painter-engineer-architect in the early Northern Song court. The discovery in 1978 of the "Zhang" signature on The Water Mill contradicted the authorship of the great Wei Xian, to whom the painting was once attributed. Nevertheless, whoever painted The Water Mill must have been indebted to Wei Xian as well as other earlier masters of the genre.(n112) The unidentified "Zhang," as I have suggested, was most likely an immediate follower of Wei Xian at the Taizong court. The Song accounts of academy painters do not yield any record of a Zhang active in the Northern Song court.(n113) However, Wai-kam Ho's remarks on the institution of the Northern Song Imperial Painting Academy as "a melting pot" that recruited talents from various regions and from all walks of life may lead to another possibility.(n114) After the founding of the new dynasty, painters of the conquered states, especially those from the last courts of the Shu and Southern Tang, were summoned to the Northern Song capital to join the Imperial Painting Academy. Yet, given the limited number of academy appointments,(n115) many painters were assigned to work as artisans in various crafts departments. A few lucky ones later succeeded in finding their way into the Painting Academy when their artistic talents were rediscovered by their new imperial patrons. Zhao Yuanchang, for example, was a court painter of astrological configurations in the Shu Royal Observatory. After the fall of the Shu, he followed the Shu ruler Meng Chang (r. 935-65) in submitting to Taizu and was demoted to an artisan in the Bureau of Fine Crafts (Wensiyuan):(n116)

On one occasion, Yuanchang painted a tame pheasant to decorate an imperial throne. At that time, a tethered falcon being handled by a keeper of the Five Cages(n117) attempted to free itself from the gauntlet and take flight. His Majesty ordered the bird released, whereupon it straightaway attacked the painted pheasant. His Majesty was so amazed that he admired the painting at length. He then commanded Yuanchang to enter the Painting Academy as a painter-in-apprentice.(n118)

The unidentified "Zhang" of The Water Mill may have been a court artisan like Zhao Yuanchang in one of the crafts departments before his academy appointment. The Sichuanese master Zhang Sixun appears to be a promising candidate. He presented a design and model of the first water-powered astronomical clock to Taizong, the patron of both Sixun's astronomical clock and the water mill agencies, in 976. More intriguingly, Taizong named Sixun's work Astronomical Clock of Supreme Peace on its completion in 977, the same year he made four visits to water mills. There is also the possibility, as I have suggested earlier, that the Shanghai Water Mill was painted around that time. In any event, both the astronomical clock and the water mill were machines of hydraulic engineering. Zhang Sixun, as the designer of the astronomical clock, might well have been the author of The Water Mill. This is particularly relevant in terms of the function of the painting as a blueprintlike design for actual construction or of the painter as engineer-architect, the most outstanding feature in the Northern Song practice of architectural painting. The true identity of the painter of The Water Mill may never be known, but the possibility that imperially commissioned paintings were produced in other departments of the court outside the academy should be noted.

Northern Song literature abounds in images of the water mill, revealing the great interest taken by both the Buddhist church and the ruling elite in aspects of the water mill other than monetary profit. A review of these diverse interpretations will demonstrate that the water mill was not only a symbol of economic and imperial power but also an embodiment of moral and spiritual values. An anecdote related by the twelfth-century Buddhist priest Xiaoying (d. after 1155) tells how a plaque reading "The Wheel of Dharma Forever Turns [falun chang zhuan]" on a temple-owned water mill in Shuzhou (modern Huaining, Anhui Province) inspired a Chan monk named Zhongdao with sudden enlightenment. And his enlightenment in turn led the abbot and the mill master of that temple to contemplate the movement of the water mill as a metaphor for the eternal turning of the Wheel of Dharma.(n119) In Buddhist terminology, the Wheel of Dharma (falun) is a metaphor for the power of the Doctrine that overcomes all evil. The priest knowingly used the wheel as a visual pun to transform the mechanical movement of the waterwheel into the spiritual power of the Buddha.

Of equal interest are the interpretations that scholar-officials imposed on the water mill. "Record of the West Water Mill [Xi shuimo ji]" written by Yang Jie (jinshi 1059), chamberlain for ceremonies at the Shenzong court, is a firsthand account of the author's visit with his colleagues to the famous West Water Mill during the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1079 (the same one that Taizu visited in 965 and one of the first two water mill agencies that he established in 970). According to Yang, the West Water Mill was distinguished from the East and Datongmen Water Mills by the majesty of its surrounding scenery:

After the hosts and guests both arrived, they set bronze wine cups by the stream and dusted the rocks with their sleeves to sit down. Some fished in clear deep waters and fish would swim over for their bait; some played the zither and the gulls would remain docile and uninterrupted. The water was no more than a foot deep on the sand, so they could wade barefoot; a fishing boat was like a fallen leaf, so they could lie down when they got drunk. At a moment like this, both hosts and guests were happy and carefree, as if flying across the vast rivers and lakes and into the deep mountains and forests. How could they still remember the noise of carriages and horses on the metropolitan streets?(n120)

By 1079 the state agency might have been long gone, but the West Water Mill remained a fashionable resort for government bureaucrats, as it had been for the first two Northern Song emperors. The setting described in Yang Jie's "Record of the West Water Mill" might almost describe the water mill in the Shanghai scroll, which appears to occupy an attractive suburban site.

"Rhapsody on a Water Mill [Shuimo fu]" is a long descriptive poem by Zhang Shunmin (ca. 1034-ca. 1110, jinshi 1065), investigating censor of Zhezong's court, composed in 1106-7 on a privately owned water mill he visited near Chang'an (modern Xi'an) as a potential buyer.(n121) On approaching the mill, Shunmin found an excited crowd of onlookers watching the spectacle:

Wheat and rice are piled up like hills,
Trip-hammers and mortars face each other straight;
With intersecting cogs and gear teeth,
Now husking, now grinding, [the mill works] night and
day without cease;
Raging and roaring, [the water runs] deep and fast,
Making sounds of thumping and bumping.

After the excitement of the initial encounter, he takes an encyclopedic view of the entire structure of the mill inside and out, top to bottom, from the Wheel of Heaven (tianlun) to the Axis of Earth (dizhou). Shunmin's application of the ideological terminology to the mechanical engineering of the water mill recalls his contemporary Su Song's use of the same terminology in his presentation of the astronomical clock (Figs. 11, 12). While Su Song's "Heaven" and "Earth" symbolize the eternity of imperial power, Shunmin's represent the principles of government. No wonder, when his eye follows the water running downstream, he sees in the water mill the persona of a true scholar-official:

Now [the water] slows into ripples circling ripples,
Becoming gentle and returning to its orderly flow
[Cheng wen bu li];(n122)
Boundless and clear, deep and silent,
[This is] the merit of resilience.
Rest, when momentum is gone;
Retreat, when deeds are done.
[This is] the virtue of a gentleman.

Shunmin adds that even the high waterfalls from the peaks of Mt. Hua or the rushing cascades of Mt. Lüliang cannot be compared to the humble water mill, because the mill takes so little and gives so much:

It occupies no more than a ten-foot plot,
Manned by only one worker,
In less than one morning,
Pouring forth flour and rice to feed a thousand
mouths.

In the eyes of Shunmin, the power of the water mill generated by the advanced hydraulic technology personifies the ideal Confucian government--efficient and benevolent. He moves on to identify the role of the scholar-official in government:

Thus, without employing donkeys and horses,
With wheat piling up like a mountain
And peasants reaping continuously,
[The water mill does it all] because the wise man plans it so.
When the gentleman puts his mind to work,
The commoner can draw his bread from it.

The rhapsody draws a moral from the mundane machine; Zhang Shunmin sees in the mechanical movement of the mill the steady moral virtue of the scholar-official. The rhapsody also recounts how the author's visit to the mill satisfied his intellectual curiosity about hydraulic engineering. That the visit originated in his financial interest as a potential buyer of the mill suggests competition between the state and individual scholar-officials in the operation of water milling.(n123) Despite the tension, both the government and individuals recognized in the water mill a sign of human ingenuity and a symbol of economic power.

Parallel to the water mill's transformation into an imperial symbol and a literary metaphor was the rise of landscape painting as an equally powerful imperial symbol. Late in the Northern Song period, the water mill merged with the landscape to form a new theme in painting. A brief look into this later development demonstrates the far-reaching significance of the Shanghai Water Mill.

Toward the end of the eleventh century, with the increased popularity of landscape painting at court and the dominance of landscape artists in the Painting Academy, the jiehua style experienced a gradual decline. Writing in 1074, Guo Ruoxu already noted his contemporaries' faulty knowledge of architecture as the reason for the decline of the time-honored jiehua tradition:(n124)

In painting architectural constructions, the calculations should be faultless, and the brush drawing should be of even strength, long and deep to penetrate space, receding in a hundred diagonal lines. This was true of the work of masters of the Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties, down to Guo Zhongshu and Wang Shiyuan [fl. ca. 970-90] at the beginning of the present dynasty. Their paintings of towers and pavilions usually showed all four corners with their brackets arranged in order; and front and rear were clearly distinguished without error in the draughtsmanship. Painters nowadays mainly use the ruler to draw pictures of architecture. In laying out the bracketing, their drawings are so intricate as to be ambiguous and confusing, lacking [their predecessors'] sense of grandeur and naturalness.(n125)

Guo Ruoxu's assessment of the decline of the "sense of grandeur and naturalness" in jiehua painting can be confirmed by comparing the Shanghai Water Mill with a depiction of the water mill in a landscape from the horizontal scroll A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains (Fig. 21). The author of this enchanting painting was the gifted but short-lived Wang Ximeng (1096-1119), Huizong's protégé.(n126) The water mill, here nestled in a deep valley (Fig. 22), is driven by a large, undershot, vertical waterwheel and right-angle gearing. A sluice gate, half hidden behind the roof of the mill, controls the water to power the waterwheel. The mechanism of the millstone and the funnel in the upper compartment is too sketchy to be legible, which betrays the young artist's faulty understanding of hydraulic engineering and his inattention to details of architectural drawing. To the right of the water mill is an unattended winnowing sieve suspended from the ground by three pillars, which looks like the two similar tools on the right terrace of the Shanghai Water Mill (Fig. 1). While the Shanghai sieves are well drawn, with clear definition of space, weight, and solidity, Wang's sieve, like the rest of his water mill, appears ambiguous, vague, weightless, and simplistic. In contrast to the bustling suburban setting of the Shanghai scroll, this mill seems to be part of a private country villa, where the slow pace of milling finds a close affinity with the idyllic neighborhood.

As Wang painted his landscape under Huizong's personal instruction, the Thousand Miles reflects the imperial taste that, in Max Loehr's words, "combines Tang ornateness in its rich, bright blue and turquoise pigments with Northern Song vastness of space and minuteness of design."(n127) To students of Chinese painting, the brilliant azurite blue and malachite green of the scroll immediately recall the court landscape tradition from the sixth century on, which was firmly established as a stylistic idiom symbolic of imperial power by the early twelfth century.(n128) The blue-and-green style of Wang's landscape, however, proved popular only briefly, as its lighthearted mood was more closely tied to the bygone aristocratic aesthetic than to the rising new bureaucratic government eager to invigorate the economy. In its grand vision, the Thousand Miles is an early twelfth-century interpretation of the eleventh-century monumental landscape(n129) represented by the vertical scroll Early Spring painted by Guo Xi (d. ca. 1098), Emperor Shenzong's favorite painter, in 1072 (Fig. 23). Early Spring might have been intended as a symbol of imperial power, as stated in Lofty Power of Forests and Streams (Linquan gaozhi), a treatise compiled by Guo Xi's son Si (ca. 1052-1122, jinshi 1082) based on his father's comments on landscape painting:

A great mountain is dominating as chief over the assembled hills, thereby ranking in an ordered arrangement the ridges and peaks, forests and valleys, as suzerains of varying degrees and distances. The general appearance is of a great lord glorious on his throne and a hundred princes hastening to pay him court, without any effect of arrogance or withdrawal.(n130)

Guo claims that the pictorial hierarchy of the landscape reflects the political hierarchy of the Northern Song court. The painting carries an auspicious message: under the warmth of the spring sun, the winter earth awakens from the cold. As Early Spring was created in the time of Shenzong's support of Wang Anshi's New Policies reform, Alfreda Murck has interpreted the landscape painting as "a celebration of the dawn of the new era that Shenzong and Wang Anshi had brought to the empire" and "an elegant metaphor for the success of the New Policies."(n131) Wang Ximeng's Thousand Miles has close ties with Guo Xi's Early Spring and the Shanghai Water Mill in its celebration of imperial patronage, a link that connects the later emperors, Huizong and Shenzong, with their founding ancestors, Taizu and Taizong. In its iconography, the Thousand Miles combines the idioms of both the monumental landscape and the earlier jiehua water mill into a water mill landscape.

Numerous water mill paintings were made in the following centuries of imperial China, but all are dwarfed by their ancestor, the Shanghai Water Mill. In these later paintings, the water mill is typically depicted as a small motif in the auspicious snowy landscape.(n132) Huang Ding's (1660-1730) Snow Clearing over Mountain Peaks of 1729 best represents the perpetuation of the Northern Song water mill as imperial symbol in the eighteenth century (Fig. 24).(n133) A diagonal path in the lower right corner of the composition takes the viewer to the center of the foreground, where a wineshop and an inn are located (Fig. 25). Continuing on the same diagonal path toward the left, the viewer may follow a lone traveler with a donkey across a bridge to a water mill with three horizontal wheels driven by a strong stream rushing down from a high valley. Although the mill structure is well drawn, the painting gives no description of the mechanism of the mill-work, which is typical of the abbreviated rendering of the water mill in landscape since the late Northern Song. The configuration of soaring peaks and floating clouds and the sharp contrast of light and dark point to the artist's use of Western illusionistic techniques, which were widely available in China by that time.(n134) An inscription above the center of the landscape written by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-95), dated 1769, forty years after the painting was made,(n135) includes a poem of eighteen lines that mentions the water mill (lines 9-12):

A Buddhist temple here, a village inn there, are set apart,
Each is located properly for [the viewer's] exploration.
A water mill husks rice on a crystal-clear running stream;
A wineshop drives cold away with its blue flag.

The eighteenth-century Qianlong emperor, who took a deep interest in hydraulic engineering and launched several large-scale water conservancy projects during his long reign of sixty years,(n136) must have seen an auspicious vision of the empire in the simple scene of temple, wineshop, and water mill in a snowy landscape, just as the Northern Song emperors saw it in the Shanghai Water Mill and in Guo Xi's imperial landscapes eight or seven centuries before. In this light, Snow Clearing over Mountain Peaks, like other earlier water mill landscapes, could be placed among the post-Song revivals of this theme, in which the season of snow, water mill, and wineshop were all transformed into moral metaphors and political symbols. The pairing of the water mill and the wineshop recalls the economic, scientific, and stylistic ties of the two enterprises established in the Shanghai Water Mill.

The transformation of the mundane water mill into an imperial symbol is like a Cinderella story in Chinese art. This study has examined the close relationship between the water mill and imperial patronage to demonstrate the importance of commerce and science in Northern Song society and the economic and political benefits offered by the imperialization of the water mill. Events of public display confirmed the security of imperial patronage, propagated the importance of the water mill, and conferred on the water mill an implication of imperial power. The unsurpassed achievement of Northern Song jiehua painting, represented by the Shanghai Water Mill, was contemporary with the vigorous practice of imperial architecture and architectural literature, on the one hand, and with the marked advances of science and technology (particularly mechanical engineering), on the other. It was a time when jiehua masters served as the emperor's architects and engineers. The imperial symbolism of the water mill was strengthened by the many compelling literary and political metaphors created by contemporary scholar-officials. In their writings, the water mill serves as an inspiration for moralistic expression and as a vehicle of political rhetoric. This literature elevates the commonplace machine and enables all later viewers to recognize its metaphoric meaning. Thus, as long as the literature exists, the meaning of the water mill will not be lost or misunderstood. In this way, the water mill became a significant machine in the national development of the Northern Song dynasty. The Shanghai Water Mill remains the visual evidence of such development.

This article is dedicated to my teachers Richard M. Barnhart and James Cahill, who have engaged me in a lifelong study of Song painting.

Initial research for this study was first presented at the 1995 College Art Association Conference in San Antonio in a panel on Chinese institutions and art chaired by Amy McNair. It subsequently became chapter 4 of my 1997 dissertation, with Richard Barnhart as adviser and James Cahill, Jonathan Hay, and Valerie Hansen as readers. The present article reflects my postdissertation research and offers a more precise interpretation. Research for this article was supported with a University of Puget Sound faculty award in 1998 and a Wellesley College faculty award in 2000. I express my gratitude to the Shanghai Museum, the Palace Museum in Beijing, and the National Palace Museum in Taipei for granting permission to reproduce photographs of paintings in their collections for this article. I offer my sincere thanks to Susan Bush, Margaret Carroll, Rebecca Bedell, and Alessandra Comini for reading the whole or a part of its first draft, and to Maxwell Hearn for providing me with the black-and-white photographic print of a key image that I was unable to acquire from a Chinese museum. I am deeply indebted to Anne de Coursey Clapp for discussing this manuscript and exploring its interpretative modes, and, at the Art Bulletin, to H. Perry Chapman and the two anonymous readers for making their critical comments and important suggestions and to Lory Frankel for her thoughtful and meticulous editing of the final manuscript, all of which much improved my writing and enhanced this study.

All the biographical dates of Song authors and their works cited in this study are based on Xie Wei's Zhongguo huaxue zhuzuo kaolu (Comprehensive bibliographical studies of Chinese texts on painting) (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1998). Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

(n1.) For a historical overview of jiehua painting, see Robert J. Maeda, "Chieh-Hua: Ruled-Line Painting in China," Ars Orientalis 10 (1975): 123-41 (Chieh-hua is an old [Wade-Giles] spelling for jiehua).

(n2.) Although jiehua had been practiced for centuries prior to the Northern Song, it was not recognized by art historians and critics as an independent genre of painting until the 11th century. See SCMHP, chap. 3, 458b-59b; and WDMHBY, chap. 5, 463a-b.

(n3.) Since its first full-color reproduction in the second issue of Yiyuan duoying (Aug. 1978), the Shanghai Water Mill has drawn much scholarly attention worldwide and has frequently appeared in scholarly publications. For instance, James Cahill included the Shanghai Water Mill in An Index of Early Chinese Painters and Paintings: T'ang, Sung, and Yuan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 50, and offers an insightful reading of the painting in "Some Aspects of Tenth Century Painting as Seen in Three Recently-Published Works," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Sinology: Art History Session, Academia Sinica, Taipei, August 15-20, 1980 (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1981), 7-10. Cahill may have established the Shanghai Water Mill as one of the most representative Northern Song works by mentioning it in his three more recent studies, Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting (Lawrence, Kans.: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1988), 14; The Painter's Practice: How Artists Lived and Worked in Traditional China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 117; and The Lyric Journey: Poetic Painting in China and Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 7. The Chinese senior connoisseurs Xu Bangda, Fu Xinian, and Yang Renkai all consider the Shanghai Water Mill a Northern Song painting, in Zhongguo gudai shuhua tumu (Illustrated catalogue of selected works of ancient Chinese painting and calligraphy), comp. Zhongguo gudai shuhua jiandingzhu, vol. 2 (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1987), 346 n. 8, though none of them provides any specific explanations as to why; see also Xu Bangda, Zhongguo huihua shi tulu (Shanghai: Remin meishu chubanshe, 1981), 93-94. Peter Sturman remarks briefly on the connection between the landscape elements of the Shanghai Water Mill and those in the anonymous scroll A Solitary Temple amid Clearing Peaks in the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and suggests that both are early Northern Song works; Sturman, "The Donkey Rider as Icon: Li Cheng and Early Chinese Landscape Painting," Artibus Asiae 55, nos. 1-2 (1995): 94-95. More recently, Richard Barnhart has described the painting as an important early Northern Song work in the genre of jiehua painting; Yang Xin and Barnhart et al., Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press; Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1997), 104; and Roderick Whitfield has offered a fresh reading of the painting from the viewpoint of material culture in "Material Culture in the Northern Song Dynasty--the World of Zhang Zeduan," in Bright as Silver, White as Snow: Chinese White Ceramics from Late Tang to Yuan Dynasty--Examples from the Kai-Yin Lo Collection, ed. Kai-Yin Lo (Hong Kong: Yungmingtang, 1998), 55-62.

(n4.) For a collection of these Song texts, see Chen Gaohua, Song Liao Jin huajia shiliao (Biographies of painters of the Song, Liao, and Jin dynasties) (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1984), 178-88. For an informative account in English, see Hsio-Yen Shih's biography of the artist in Sung Biographies: Painters, ed. Herbert Franke (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1976), 69-76.

(n5.) SCMHP, chap. 6, 458b.

(n6.) The Kaibao Pagoda in Kaifeng was Yu Hao's signature work of architecture, which was described by the Hanlin scholar Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072) in 1067 as the highest and most refined of all the pagodas in the Capital. It was destroyed by lightning about 1040. See Ouyang Xiu, Guitian lu (Notes on retiring to farming) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), chap. 1, 1. Yu Hat and his architectural manual will be discussed below.

(n7.) Wenying, Yuhu qinghua (Pure talks from the Jade Jar Studio) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), chap. 2, 21.

(n8.) Li Zhi, Deyutang huaping (Evaluations of painters from the Deyu Studio), in SHQS, vol. 1, 991a. A part of the translation is cited with modifications in Maeda (as in n. 1), 126.

(n9.) The present painting, now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, is the remaining left half of an originally horizontal composition that includes as its right half a depiction of six trackers on shore towing the two boats by two ropes tied to the boats' masts. The original complete composition has been preserved in a 13th-century copy now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; see Laurence Sickman's entry on the painting in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and The Cleveland Museum of Art, by Wai-kam Ho et al. (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980), cat. no. 77. For a comparative discussion of the Taipei original fragment and the later copy in Kansas, see Maeda (as in n. 1), 127-29.

(n10.) Xuanhe (literally, "proclaiming harmony") is the name of Huizong's last reign of 1119-25. The painting catalogue was completed in 1120 during the Xuanhe era, thus adopting the name as its title. Of the 6,396 scrolls listed, only a tiny fraction survive today; fewer than two dozen have been identified by modern scholars as authentic. The only English publication, to my knowledge, with any serious discussion of the extant works of painting and calligraphy from Emperor Huizong's Xuanhe collection is Richard Barnhart, "Wang Shen and Late Northern Sung Landscape Painting," in International Symposium on Art Historical Studies, Kyoto 1983 (Kyoto: International Symposium on Art Historical Studies, 1984), 61-70. According to Barnhart's findings (App., 69-70), only ten paintings bear authentic imperial seals and/or mounting, known as the Xuanhe zhuang; another twelve bear either Huizong's inscriptions or one kind of the imperial seal. Fifteen are regarded as "spurious," "questionable," or "of insufficient knowledge."

(n11.) The authors of the Xuanhe Catalogue state that the ranking of religious subjects before temporal affairs is modeled after the great Han historian Sima Qian's (145-86B.C.E.) monumental Records of the Grand Historian (Shift), in which the legends of the two founders of Daoism, the Yellow Emperor and Laozi, were narrated before the accounts of the Six Classics of secular histories.

(n12.) "Xuanhe huapu xumu," in XHHP, 5.

(n13.) XHHP, chap. 8, 81 (emphasis added).

(n14.) Li Zhi (as in n. 8), 991a.

(n15.) WDMHBY, chap. 5, 463a; and THJWZ, chap. 2, 475b-76a.

(n16.) This interlocking relationship between composition and content was first suggested by Cahill, 1981 (as in n. 3), 8.

(n17.) For an informative discussion of Chinese "parallel perspective" in comparison with European optical perspective, see Needham et al., 1971, 111-19, figs. 776, 778.

(n18.) The most prominent collectors' seals include four seals of the Northern Song imperial collection (see n. 19 below); the imperial "Tianli zhibao" of the Yuan emperor Wenzong (r. 1328-30); the late 14th-century "Jinfu tushu" of the Ming prince of Jin, Zhu Gan (third son of the Ming dynasty founder Zhu Yuanzhang); the 15th-century "Yiwang zhizhang" of the Ming prince of Yi, Zhu Youbing (sixth son of Emperor Xianzong, r. 1465-87); and the private seal "Jiaolin" of the eminent 17th-century collector Liang Qingbiao (1620-1691). In the next three centuries the scroll was circulated among several more private collectors until 1965, when it finally found its permanent home in the Shanghai Museum. See Zheng, 17-18.

(n19.) The first two of the four seals on the Shanghai Water Mill, reading "Zhenghe" and "Xuanhe," corresponding with the two reigns of Huizong, datable to 1111-18 and 1119-25 respectively, are placed over the top and bottom borders between the end of the painting and its hougeshui (rear silk brocade). The third is a linked seal composed of "Zheng" and "He" placed over the middle border between the rear silk brocade and its tuowei (succeeding paper). And the last is the Inner Palace Library seal "Neifu tushu zhiyin," placed on the center of the tuowei paper. It is supposed that the other three seals of the Xuanhe zhuang are on the now lost mounting preceding the painting: a gourd-shaped seal reading "Yushu" (imperial calligraphy) and placed over the border between the yinshou (beginning paper) and the qiangeshui (beginning silk brocade); a square seal reading "Tianshui" (heavenly water) in the form of two facing dragons placed over the top border between the title inscription written by Huizong on a narrow strip of yellow silk and the upper right corner of the painting; and a linked seal reading "Xuan" and "He" placed below the emperor's title inscription in the lower right corner. For an informative discussion of the Xuanhe zhang, see Barnhart, 1984 (as in n. 10), 1-2. My own examination of the Shanghai Water Mill showed that traces of the left parts of the double-dragon seal and the Xuan-He linked seal are still visible on the edges of the painting, although the original beginning silk brocade has been lost. The presence of the Xuanhe zhuang seals once led scholars to believe that the Shanghai scroll might have been the "Sluice Gate with Freight Carts" listed in the 1120 imperial painting catalogue Xuanhe huapu under the name of Wei Xian; see XHHP, chap. 8, 83.

(n20.) Zheng, 17, fig. 1.

(n21.) See Zheng Wei's brief report of the discovery, "Zhakou pangche tu juan," Yiyuan duoyin 2 (Aug. 1978): 19.

(n22.) The two ends and top of The Water Mill seem to have been truncated, so questions have been raised about the original composition. I believe that the truncation, caused mainly by the previous remounting of the scroll, does not fragment the painting; in other words, the current composition preserves the original one. This is confirmed by the presence of the artist's signature (both the recent discovery of "Zhang" and the interpolation of "Wei Xian") on the left edge of the painting, a convention to mark the end of the composition.

(n23.) For instance, Zheng Wei points out several noticeable stylistic and iconographic features corresponding with other late 10th-century art objects: the depiction of both the architecture and trees relates closely to that in the widely reproduced Lofty Scholar, a painting attributed to Wei Xian by Huizong now in the Palace Museum, Beijing; the diamond-patterned lattice of the window panels on both sides of the upper-storied flour mill are characteristic of the 10th-century primitive style and comparable to those on an early Song house-shaped porcelain pillow in the Shanghai Museum; the balustrade on the upper structure of the wineshop is similar to that on the upper structure of the Guanyin Pavilion in the Liao Buddhist monastery Dulesi in Jixian, Hebei Province, datable to 984; and the hook-shaped decor of the back of a chair inside the thatched pavilion is almost identical with that of a chair in the dance scene of another horizontal scroll, Night Entertainment of Han Xizai, attributed to the 10th-century Southern Tang court artist Gu Hongzhong; see Zheng, 20-22, figs. 5, 7, 9. Cahill, Xu Bangda, Fu Xinian, Yang Renkai, Barnhart, and Sturman all seem to agree on the late 10th-early 11th century date.

(n24.) For an analysis of the nature of representation in Song academy painting, see Cahill, "The Imperial Painting Academy," in Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei, by Wen C. Fong and James C. Y. Watt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1996), 159.

(n25.) A model for tackling this and other neglected topics in the study of Chinese art can be found in a recent publication of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Art in History, History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, edited by David Freedberg and Jan de Vries (Santa Monica, 1991), which evolved from a symposium under the same title held at the Getty Center in 1987. Some of my thoughts presented in this article are inspired by the studies in the above volume, especially the dialogues between de Vries and Freedberg, including Freedberg's concluding essay, "Science, Commerce, and Art: Neglected Topics at the Junction of History and Art History," 377-428.

(n26.) See Mark Elvin's classic study The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), esp. pt. 2, chaps. 9-13. It is worth noting that chief among the innovations of this revolution was the invention of the world's first paper money (jiaozi) in the late 10th century, by merchants in the mountainous Shu region (modern Sichuan Province), to facilitate their long-distance transactions. The Northern Song government first granted the monopoly of the notes to sixteen wealthy merchant houses but took over the monopoly in 1023 with its establishment of the Agency of Exchange Medium (Jiaoziwu). For a succinct historical overview of the Northern Song monetary revolution, see Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 261-72.

(n27.) The Northern Song commerce and market economy have been studied by numerous Western, Japanese, and Chinese economic historians, including Robert M. Hartwell, "The Evolution of the Early Northern Sung Monetary System," Journal of the American Oriental Society 87, no. 3 (1967): 280-89; Elvin (as in n. 26), esp. chaps. 11-12; Shiba Yoshinobu, Commerce and Society in Sung China, trans. Mark Elvin, Michigan Abstracts of Chinese and Japanese Works on Chinese History, no. 2 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1970); Qi Xia, Songdai jingji shi (History of Song economy), 2 vols. (Shanghai: Remin chubanshe, 1988); and Wang Shengduo, Lian Song caizheng shi (History of Northern and Southern Song state finance), 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1995).

(n28.) For a discussion of the three-quarter view as "the predominant device in Chinese portrait painting from the Six Dynasties period to the early Yuan Dynasty," see Wai-kam Ho, "Development of Chinese Portrait Painting as Seen from the Face-Orientation of the Subjects," in International Symposium on Art Historical Studies 6: Portraiture (Kyoto: Society for International Exchange of Art Historical Studies, 1987), 133-36.

(n29.) SS, chap. 153, 3564. The popularity of wearing futou in Northern Song times is reflected in the many curiously detailed discussions on its origins and types in Song literature. The 11th-century encyclopedic scholar-official Shen Gua identifies five types of futou worn by men of different classes in his time; see Shen, Mengxi bitan (Brush talks from the Dream Brook), annotated by Hu Daojing (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1962), chap. 1, 57-61. Hu's annotations include a number of other Song references on the subject.

(n30.) This portrait of Emperor Taizu is among the group of surviving Song imperial portraits in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, art historically known as part of the "Imperial Portraits in the Nanxun Hall" (Nanxundian tuxiang). For a detailed study of the history and inventory of the imperial portraits of the Nanxun Hall, see Chiang Fu-tsung, "Guoli Gugong bowuynan cang Qing Nanxundian tuxiang kao," National Palace Museum Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1974): 1-18, with English summary. See also Wen C. Fong, "Sung Imperial Portraits," in Fong and Watt (as in n. 24), 140-45.

(n31.) "New wine" was one of the two types of seasonal liquor popular in Northern Song times. It customarily appeared on the capital market by the lunar calendar on the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival in the eighth month and was served at court on the first day of the ninth month. The other type was "heated wine" (zhujiu), sold in spring on the eve of the Qingming Festival of the third month. The making and consumption of these two wines are richly recorded in Song texts.

(n32.) Meng Yuanlao, Dongjing meng Hua lu (A record of the dreaming of Hua in the Eastern Capital), annotated by Deng Zhicheng (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), chap. 2, 71. Meng's memoirs offer a rich source of information on Northern Song urban life. For a critical analysis of Meng's book and later scholarship on it, see Stephen H. West, "The Interpretation of a Dream: The Sources, Evaluation, and Influence of the Dongjing Meng Hua lu," T'ung Pao 71 (1985): 63-107.

(n33.) Cheng Dachang was active in the court of the Southern Song emperor Xiaozong (r. 1163-89). See Cheng, "Xingma," chap. 1 in Yan Fanlu (Extending the commentaries) (1180; Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), 13a.

(n34.) The emperor was Guo Wei (r. 951-54), founder of the short-lived Posterior Zhou dynasty (951-61). See the 13th-century scholar Wu Zimu's Meng Liang lu (Memoirs of Lin'an) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang remin chubanshe, 1980), chap. 16, 141.

(n35.) Cahill, 1981 (as in n. 3), 9, has delineated the viewing experience created in the Shanghai Water Mill as the result of "a growing skill in techniques for allowing the viewer to participate in a process of analytical exploration and discovery, and a growing fascination with the capacity of painting for objective probing of physical reality." The half-open-door motif, often accompanied by a half-hidden figure (usually a woman) behind the door, appears frequently in Northern Song painting and sculpture. The noted archaeologist Su Bai, in his classic study of the important finds from the three 1099 Northern Song tombs excavated in 1951 at Baisha, Henan Province, identifies ten examples of the same motif with various Song dates, including two from the Baisha tombs. The earliest use of the motif can be found on two early Tang Buddhist mortuary pagodas of the 7th century; see Su, Baisha Song mu (Song tombs at Baisha) (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1957), 1-13, 38-39 n. 75, fig. 38, pls. 28, 29.

(n36.) "Shihuo," in SHY, bk. 131, 5133a-34a. The effectiveness of these government measures was open to debate. The frequency of imperial decrees implied at least some lack of effectiveness. The central government certainly could not control the relatively remote regions and had to permit private wine production and sale; ibid., 5134.

(n37.) Fajiuku was staffed with 3 eunuch supervisors, 2 foremen, 14 wine makers, and 110 soldier-workers; Neijiufang with 3 supervisors, 2 foremen, 19 wine makers, and 139 soldier-workers, plus 14 storehouse keepers; and Duquyuan with 2 eunuch supervisors, some 30 technicians, and 428 soldier-workers. For a historical overview of the Northern Song government monopoly in wine based on SHY and other Song documents, see Qi (as in n. 27), vol. 2, 875-89.

(n38.) For a vivid example, see Hong Mai (1123-1202), Yijian zhi (Record of the listener), bk. 9, chap. 5 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 1086-88, cited in Valerie Hansen, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 210-13.

(n39.) See E. A. Kracke Jr., "Sung K'ai-feng: Pragmatic Metropolis and Formalistic Capital," in Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China, ed. John Winthrop Haeger (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975), 49-77; and Zhou Baozhu, Song dai Dongjing yanjiu (Studies on the Northern Song eastern capital) (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 1992), esp. chaps. 4-9.

(n40.) For a discussion of the invention and early use of the water mill in China, see Needham et al., 1965, 369-70 and note h.

(n41.) "Shihuo," in SHY, bk. 147, 5748b.

(n42.) Appointing eunuchs to official posts was common in the Northern Song, especially those overseeing commercial, technical, and artistic production for imperial consumption. The exact rank of the water mill supervisors in the nine-rank system of Northern Song bureaucracy is not clear. I have not been able to find any Song documentation about eunuchs' dress code in their civil service appointment. Professor Gong Yanming of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, a prominent expert on the history of Song dynasty institutions and author of the comprehensive Songdai guanzhi cidian (A dictionary of Song official titles and institutions) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997), holds that eunuchs would change their dress from the simple eunuch robe to the official attire after their official appointment; personal communication, Dec. 21, 2001. For an informative entry on the water mill agency, see Gong, 326.

(n43.) "Shihuo," in SHY, bk. 147, 5748b.

(n44.) For a classic study of the importance of the Bian River based on historical sources, see Quan Hansheng, "Tang Song diguo yi Yunhe" (The Tang and Song empires and the Grand Canal), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo zhuankan 24 (1944), reprinted in Quan Hansheng, Zhongguo jingjishi yanjiu (Studies on Chinese economic history) (Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 1991), 265-391, esp. 357-86.

(n45.) See the biography of Zu Chongzhi in Xiao Zixian (489-537), Nan Qi shu (History of the Southern Qi dynasty.) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1972), chap. 52, 906.

(n46.) Taizu's inspection is recorded on the twentieth day of the ninth month in the third year of his Qiande reign (965). CB, chap. 6, 158; and SS, chap. 2, 22.

(n47.) Another Northern Song example is the rebuilding of the imperial library, proposed by Taizong on his first inspection of the facility right after he ascended the throne in 976. On its completion two years later, Taizong named the new imperial library Chongwenyuan. CB, chap. 19, 422.

(n48.) SS, chap. 3, 44-45, 47; and CB, chap. 17, 371-72.

(n49.) Of Taizong's six visits to water mills listed here, the first is recorded in CB, chap. 18, 404, and SS, chap. 4, 55; the second in SS, chap. 4, 56; the third in CB, chap. 18, 412, and SS, chap. 4, 56; the fourth in SS, chap. 4, 57; the fifth in SS, chap. 4, 64; and the last in SS, chap. 5, 92.

(n50.) The two favorite places for Taizu and Taizong to have archery dinner parties after their water mill visits were the Jade Water Park (Yujinyuan) and the West Imperial Park (Xiyuyuan). See CB, chap. 18, 404, 412; and SS, chap. 4, 55-56.

(n51.) The other two sections of the Jingde scroll are "Receiving the Khitan Envoys" and "Viewing Books at the Pavilion of Great Purity." For a full-color reproduction of the entire set of the Four Events, see the reduced-size (English) version of the exhibition catalogue Art and Culture of the Sung Dynasty, 960-1279 (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 2000), 64-65.

(n52.) This event is recorded in CB, chap. 63, 10.

(n53.) The Four Events scroll might be remains of the 100 Events of the First Three Northern Song Courts recorded by Guo Ruoxu, a large-scale painting project Emperor Renzong (r. 1023-63) commissioned from Gao Keming and others in 1049; on their completion, the ten scrolls (each containing ten events) were carved on blocks and printed for distribution. See "Xunjian tu" in THJWZ, chap. 6, 492a-93b.

(n54.) For instance, Taizu enjoyed watching fish during his visit to the East Water Mill in the eighth month of 974; Taizong enjoyed watching fish during his last two water mill visits in 980 and 993. See SS, chap. 3, 45, chap. 4, 64, chap. 5, 92, respectively.

(n55.) Patricia Ebrey, "Taking Out the Grand Carriage: Imperial Spectacle and the Visual Culture of Northern Song Kaifeng," Asia Major, 3rd ser., 12, no. 1 (1999): 35. See also Ebrey's other study of the Song imperial display, "Portrait Sculptures in Imperial Ancestral Rites in Song China," T'oung Pao 83 (1997): 42-92.

(n56.) The two scrolls were presented to the throne by the state finance commissioner Ding Wei (966-1037) and the chief eunuch Liu Chenggui (949-1012) in commemoration of the event; see SS, chap. 7, 142.

(n57.) Documents of Zhenzong's feng and shan sacrifices, like important imperial activities in any of the Song reigns, are abundant in Song official and private texts. For an excellent historical overview of the event, see Suzanne E. Cahill, "Taoism at the Sung Court: The Heavenly Text Affair of 1008," Bulletin of Sung and Yuan Studies 16 (1980): 23-44.

(n58.) One rare surviving work is the mid-11th-century Illustration of the Imperial Grand Carriage Procession: The Middle Section (Dajia lubu tu zhongdao), a monumental horizontal silk scroll describing a procession rehearsal that involves over eight thousand officials, soldiers, horses, and other animals. Ebrey has observed the use of visual abbreviation in the Grand Carriage scroll by pointing out that the actual numbers of participants recorded in historical sources were even higher than those depicted in the painting; see Ebrey, 1999 (as in n. 55), 42. See also Chen Pengcheng, "Jiuti Dajia lubu tu shu zhongdao yanjiu--'Yanyou