Burned on a Deathbed, Reunited Three Centuries Later

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By 1650 the painting had passed down through three centuries of owners to a collector named Wu Hongyu, who loved it enough that, dying, he ordered it burned so it could accompany him into the afterlife. His nephew pulled the scroll from the fire before it was destroyed, but not before it had already torn into two unequal pieces. The larger piece, later called the Master Wuyong Scroll after the Daoist priest Huang Gongwang had originally painted it for, eventually reached the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The smaller fragment, called The Remaining Mountain, went to what is now the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou, on the Chinese mainland. For the rest of the twentieth century the two pieces existed on opposite sides of the Taiwan Strait, in two museums shaped by the same political division that kept them apart, each holding a portion of one continuous handscroll that had not been whole since a dying man tried to take it with him. In 2011, the two institutions arranged a joint exhibition at the National Palace Museum, laying both fragments out together for visitors for the first time since 1650. The reunion, brief and logistically difficult to arrange, is now itself part of how the painting is discussed, alongside the brushwork Huang Gongwang actually intended anyone to see whole.