Recently the Jieziyuan Huapu (Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual), which was collected by a citizen, Mr Liu from Qingdao, Shandong Province, attracted the attention of the city’s culture relics bureau. It has appraised the treasure left from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) as worth more than 1 million yuan (about US$121,000). Amazingly, Mr Liu bought it from a salvage station for 30 yuan (about US$3.6) per page, and it’s said the salvage station bought it for a total value of 0.3 yuan (about US$0.04).

The Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual was a copied edition. It is well preserved. There are 90 paintings altogether in three volumes that include manuals for drawing hills and rivers, orchids, bamboo, plum blossom and chrysanthemums, other flowers, grass, worms and birds. But a manual for drawing people was absent. The manual systematically introduces the basic skill of Chinese painting. Each volume shows the skill, brushwork, and rhymed formula for copying all genres of the traditional painting art.

Shen Yinbo in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) had the Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual prepared by three famous painters, Wang Gai, Wang Qi and Wang Nie. They complemented the work of the 43 paintings of Li Liufang, a famous Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) painter. There are altogether 133 paintings in the manual. With the help of Li Yu, the manual was published, and named Jieziyuan Huapu (Mustard Seed Garden Painting Manual) after Li’s villa Jieziyuan (Mustard Seed Garden) in Nanjing. There are four volumes. The manual represents the peak of color printing in the Qing Dynasty and had a profound influence on painting thereafter. And others complemented the fourth volume -- manual of people.

The manual includes many Chinese painting skills and is a guidebook for beginners -- just like the oil painting beginner must learn pencil sketching. Almost all Chinese great masters of painting -- Xu Beihong, Qi Baishi, Lin Fengmian and so on -- copied this when they began to learn painting.

According to a worker from the salvage station, an old woman near the Jiangsu Road sold the manual. It was left by her husband who died 12 years ago. In June 2003, the old woman sold it to the salvage station as waste paper at the price of 0.3 yuan.

The same day, Mr Liu found it on a truck of the salvage station and bought it for the price of 30 yuan per page. At the beginning of this year, Mr Liu had the manual authenticated at the Tianhougong folk relics appreciation market. Relics appreciation specialist, Zhang Shuzhen, director of the city’s folk museum research office, showed great interest in the manual.

Zhang Shuzhen said, he took 10 pages of the manual to Beijing, in the beginning of the year, and asked a specialist to appraise the manual. The specialist said the manual’s painter was well-grounded because it was so delicate it couldn’t be copied by an average painter. And he decided to buy the whole manual at the price of 200,000 yuan (about US$24,000) at once.

Who on earth copied this manual? And where are the missing parts? Mr Liu said an intellectual must have left the manual from the Qing Dynasty. He hopes he can find the old woman who sold the manual and make the provenance of the manual clear.

(China.org.cn by Chen Lin, February 12, 2004)