Winter Travelers in the Mountains of Shu

Below contorted peaks, the roofs and upper stories of three temples hover in the mist like the hulks of grounded ships. Scooped and hollowed by powerful forces, the mass of the mountains looms above them, resembling the kind of heavily eroded lake rock favored by wealthy Chinese as natural sculpture for their desks and gardens. In a vast reversal of scale, the singular twisted shape of such a rock has been enlarged, made monumental, to form the very mountain itself.

Paintings of fantastic landscapes such as this belong to the realms of poetry and dream, where ordinary people go about their everyday lives surrounded by an utterly surreal terrain. Wearing hoods and bundled against the winter cold, travelers on horseback briefly appear around a bend of rock at the middle left of the picture. Where the road re-emerges at lower left, other riders and men shouldering parcels thread their way single file across a zigzag wooden bridge and over curious stalagmite-like rocks that thrust from the riverbed below. A plank road supported by trestles and pilings hugs the face of the cliff at middle right, leading upward to an alpine village and ultimately to a tiny gateway in the distant mountain pass. This painting may depict the road to the famous Sword Gate Pass in Shu (modern Sichuan).