Rock vs. Paper in Chinese Art

It was the spring of 353 CE, and Wang Xizhi was hosting 41 guests for a drinking and poetry writing banquet at the Orchid Pavilion garden. At the banquet’s end, the poems were collected into an anthology, and the half-drunk host wrote a preface on the spot. This calligraphy, Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion, is considered the single most famous piece of calligraphy in Chinese history.

In the seventh century, the renowned calligraphy entered the collection of Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty. Greatly fond of this piece, he ordered copies made on both paper and stone and carried the original into his tomb. The best stone carving, lost in the wars that followed the fall of the Tang Dynasty, was rediscovered in the mid-11th century, only to eventually go missing a century later. Fortunately, multiple ink rubbings—made by applying dampened paper to a carved surface and dabbing it with ink to trace the surface—were created from that carving.

Here’s an example of an ink rubbing from the Art Institute collection that features Wang Xizhi’s preface, though it comes from a later stone carving.

Zhu Youdun (1379–1439 CE), an early Ming Dynasty prince and cultural polymath who possessed rubbings of the Preface as well as a painting of the banquet scene, instructed that both be carved on stone in 1417. Two centuries later in 1602, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, another prince, Zhu Yiyin, lamented that these stones had weathered so much that the engravings were illegible and undertook the task of creating new carvings. He then made multiple new rubbings and sent them as gifts through his extensive network of officials and literati. However, most of the stone carvings were destroyed when the Ming Dynasty came to an end, though fragments were carried into the Forbidden City in 1780 and supposedly valued by the emperors. 

For centuries the story of this banquet has taken many forms, all based on the original. This painting from the Ming Dynasty by Li Zongmo, below, for example, was made 1,200 years after the banquet took place.

Today, an even smaller fraction of the ink rubbings survive. In addition to the Art Institute’s, there is one at the Palace Museum in Beijing, though the rubbing in Chicago is more distinct and finely made, indicating perhaps that the stone might have been less worn down when the rubbing was made. The image of the Orchid Pavilion banquet in the rubbing preserves the horizontal composition of a handscroll painted by a renowned 11th-century artist, Li Gonglin (1049–1106 CE).

Although Li Gonglin’s original painting did not survive, we can compare the rubbing’s carved image with Li Zongmo’s Ming Dynasty painting. Despite the very different media of painting and rubbing, the continuity of the images and calligraphy is remarkable.

As the story starts, the host sits in a waterside pavilion

Please use the zoom tool in the upper righthand corner of the image to get a closer look.

The guests sit by the stream, waiting for the cups to pass by

Please use the zoom tool in the upper righthand corner of the image to get a closer look.

Servants on a bridge retrieve the floating wine cups

Please use the zoom tool in the upper righthand corner of the image to get a closer look.

The two generations of carvers who transferred Li’s composition onto the stone surface also made adaptations for this new medium. For example, since carving cannot present grades of color like a painting, the carvers used broken lines to depict the texture of the mountain near the waterfall.

The anonymous maker of this ink rubbing also had a say in the final look. In this detail from the rubbing in Chicago, the maker paid meticulous attention to the most minute indented lines on the stone surface. The engraved—and thus white—contour of the scholar’s brush and inkstone gives a greater sense of three-dimensionality in the final product.

The repeated transfer of images between paper and stone speaks to the complicated nature of many Chinese artworks, especially as multiple hands had performed the work. In this centuries-long game of destruction, deterioration, and reproduction, it turns out that paper has beaten rock, though the real winner is the viewer, who is able to appreciate this masterpiece of calligraphy today.

—Lucien Sun, 2024–25 COSI Rhoades Curatorial Fellow, Arts of Asia 

Explore the rubbing from the Palace Museum in Beijing.

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• Arts of Asia
• Prints and Drawings