China’s 5 Greatest Artworks Explained in One Video

5,000 years of Chinese culture, painting after painting, sculpture after sculpture. So, what's the best of it all? The cream of the crop? Well, we're going to tell you. Here are the top five works of art in all of China's history. Hey everyone, I'm Jared Madsen, and this is Learn Chinese Now. China has a long history of art, dating way back to bronze artifacts over 3,000 years ago and developing right until the present. But there are a few items that have truly stood the test of time. These are our five best. All right, let's start with the Terracotta Army, also known as the Terracotta Soldiers, or Bīngmǎ Yǒng (兵马俑). Now, you probably all know the story behind this army. The first emperor of the short-lived Qin Dynasty, Qín Cháo (秦朝), Qin Shi Huang, Qín Shǐ Huáng (秦始皇), wanted to have an army to protect him in the afterlife. I mean, who doesn't? So he built a massive tomb and around it he had people build out of terracotta pottery 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses pulling them and 150 cavalry horses. All of these statues are life-sized by the way. Now, the emperor apparently conscripted 700,000 people to build this army. You might be thinking, Jared, what's so artistic about this? You just build a factory and pump out the statues. But here's the thing. Every single face is different. 8,000 different faces to make. And the soldiers have different uniforms, hairstyles, and even heights to help differentiate their rank or job in the army. You had infantry, cavalry, archers, and generals. Also, a lot of these soldiers had real weapons built specifically for this tomb. One other amazing thing is that the faces are really realistic in a way that we'd never seen before in Chinese history. Now, some people theorize that they learned from the Greek sculptures that had come out just a few centuries earlier. Regardless, the Terracotta Army is one of the great works of art in world history. Number two, the admonition scroll, or 女史箴圖 (Nǚshǐ zhēn tú), also known as the Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies. Who's admonishing who? Well, there's a story behind this. Back in the 3rd century during the Jin Dynasty, Jìn Cháo (晉朝), there was an empress, Jia Nanfeng, Jiǎ Nánfēng (賈南風). Her emperor husband was mentally disabled. So she ruled the entire country from behind the scenes. She laid scheme after scheme to kill off rival families and threw the capital into chaos. People started to wonder what they could do about her. But no one had any ideas until one court official named Zhang Hua, Zhāng Huá (張華). He thought, you know what, I'm going to write her a poem. So, Zhang Hua wrote an 80-line poem which was called Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies, and it was later turned into a hand scroll painted by Gu Kaizhi, Gù Kǎizhī (顧愷之), which is a giant scroll that you put on a table and open from right to left. The admonition scroll combined painting, poetry and calligraphy, making it a unique artwork. So what does this poem talk about? Well, let's take a gander at the introduction scene. So it starts out like this. In the boundlessness of creation, yin and yang first separated. Okay. Blah blah blah blah blah. And then it says, "A woman's virtue values gentleness. She conceals beauty within and is pure and perfect, gentle and meek, virtuous and careful. Her proper place is in the chamber with pure virtue. She gazes up reverently." So, you get the idea. There's a bunch of different scenes showing virtuous court ladies. You've got the lady who gets rejected by the emperor for not being virtuous enough. You've got the lady who refuses to get in the emperor's litter because the emperor's litter is not a place for a woman. And you've even got a court lady who places herself in the path of an angry bear to save the emperor's life. But you've also got some very Buddhist-style musings on the ephemeral nature of life itself. There's one scene called the mountain and the hunter which goes like this. It is the way that nothing exalted is not cast down low. Of living things there are none that having flourished do not fade away. When the sun is at its highest it sinks. When the moon is at its fullest it wanes. Esteem and honor are as perilous as a pile of dust. Decline and fall are as sudden as a crossbow shot. So for all the beauty of the poem and the paintings, the message apparently didn't get through to our lovely empress. There was then a civil war and she was eventually forced to end herself. But this lovely artwork has stood the test of time, inspiring ladies all over China to fight bears for their husbands. Okay, work of art number three is the Mogao Caves, Mògāo Kū (莫高窟), which are a series of caves filled with incredible Buddhist art. Mogao was near a frontier town in the central part of what was once the Silk Road. People would travel from all over the place, Central Asia to China, bringing silk, spices, and new religions like Buddhism. One day in the year 366 AD, a Buddhist monk named Lè Zūn (樂尊) came to a cliff near Mogao and he suddenly had a vision of a thousand Buddhas floating around on the cliff. Inspired by this profound vision, he dug himself a mini cave kind of like a cubby hole so that he could meditate in this holy site. Other monks heard his story and started digging their own meditation caves. Soon more monks came and dug bigger caves to put Buddhist statues in. They started painting murals on the walls and the caves grew and grew over the centuries. Now, there are nearly 500,000 square feet of murals and over 2,000 statues, such as this famous statue of the reclining Buddha, making the Mogao Caves one of the world's great religious sites. Number four is one of China's special forms of art, calligraphy. The Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering, Lántíng Jí Xù (蘭亭集序), is considered maybe the greatest work of calligraphy of all time. So what does the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering mean? Well, back in the Jin Dynasty, Jìn Cháo (晉朝), again, a poet named Wang Xizhi, Wáng Xīzhī (王羲之), organized something like a writer's conference at this place called the Orchid Pavilion. So poets met, drank wine, and of course talked about poetry, and then they played this drinking game called floating goblets. So the Orchid Pavilion was next to a slow meandering river, and they had all these writers hang out at different spots on the riverbank. And then upstream, they put goblets of wine on platters and floated them downstream. So, if a goblet floated past you, you had to grab the wine, slam it, and write a poem on the spot. Now, this game worked pretty well because the Orchid Pavilion Gathering produced 37 poems. And so, Wang Xizhi decided to write a piece that summed up the whole gathering. And that's how we got the name Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering. So why is this calligraphy so famous? The preface was written in running script, also known as semi-cursive script. The idea with running script is like cursive, you can have all of the strokes be connected, but it's not like full cursive script where you can go totally abstract. If you want to know more about cursive and other Chinese scripts, watch our video, the evolution of Chinese characters. Now, Wang Xizhi was a master of running script, but he was drunk when he wrote the Orchid Pavilion Preface. So, this work is interesting because every character isn't picture perfect. The lines are a little uneven. There's even mistakes that he had to correct. But just like a meandering river, the calligraphy flows with life. Just look how he writes the character 之, zhī, which means of. He writes the character 20 times and it's different every single time, showing the full expression of this one character. So, he got just drunk enough to throw caution to the wind, but the next day once he was sober, he tried to write the piece again, but it just wasn't nearly as good. But the thing is, it's not just about the calligraphy. A lot of calligraphy is just copying poems. But this was an original work. And when you read it, you begin to realize why he wrote his calligraphy so emotionally. It starts off just talking about the gathering, how beautiful the weather is, the wine, the poems, but then it gets dark quick. We enjoy the momentary satisfaction of pleasures that regale us. Yet we hardly realize how swiftly we age. As desires fade and circumstances change, grief arises. What previously gratified us will soon be a relic. We cannot help but mourn. Whether life is long or short, there is always an end. Our future generations will look upon us just like we look upon our past. Pretty sad. So melancholy is an understatement here. The deep message and the beautiful calligraphy made this one of the all-time greatest Chinese calligraphy works. Unfortunately, the original Orchid Pavilion Preface has been lost. But some of the copies are so close to the original that people today are still able to enjoy this great work. All right. Now for numero uno, the greatest work of art in all of Chinese history, Along the River During the Qingming Festival, Qīngmíng Shàng Hé Tú (清明上河图). The Qingming Festival, Qīngmíng Jié (清明节), is also called Tomb Sweeping Day, and it's when families go to visit the graves of their ancestors, keeping the tomb clean and offering incense and food. But back in the day, Qingming was also a time for festivities. And that's why this painting is so bustling. So this Song Dynasty, Sòng Cháo (宋朝), painting is a hand scroll like the Admonition Scroll, and it's 15 feet long. There's a central bridge called the Rainbow Bridge. And then you've got all sorts of people, rich and poor, of all different trades and classes, 800 people in total. And as you look at it, you are struck by how much detail there is and how expressive all the little figures are. You get an incredibly good sense of what life was like back in China in the 1100s. Now, the Qingming painting has been a favorite of emperors throughout China's history. In fact, the last emperor of China loved it so much that when he was forced to flee the imperial palace in 1924, he took it with him. And it was 20 years before the painting was recovered. Along the way, certain emperors commissioned copies of this painting. But the copies were so different from the original that they became artworks of their own. For instance, the Qing Dynasty, Qīng Cháo (清朝), emperor Yongzheng, Yōngzhèng Dì (雍正帝), hired five painters to redo the Qingming scroll. The new version was now 35 feet long and had over 4,000 people in it. But the original is so famous that it's often called China's Mona Lisa. There are massive lines to see it, and it almost never leaves China. They even made a 3D digital version of it so that more people could see it. So, that's our top five works of art through 5,000 years of Chinese history. Did we leave anything out? What are your top five? Let me know in the comments. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and become a member by clicking join below. Also, I am the MC for Shen Yun Performing Arts, Shén Yùn Yìshù Tuán (神韻藝術團), and I got all of you out there, our Learn Chinese Now super fans, a special secret discount on tickets by using code LCN, which you can also find in the description below. All right, until next time. 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