Daily Art

This 624-centimeter silk handscroll spent centuries out of sight before turning up in 1966 in an excavation near Suzhou, Jiangsu — far from the Forbidden City halls it depicts. It is believed to be the earliest surviving Chinese painting to show fireworks actually bursting in the night sky, part of a sequence following the pleasure-loving Chenghua Emperor through a full day of Lantern Festival firecrackers, acrobats, conjurors and a market thronged with foreign tribute-bearers. Because "xingle tu" scrolls like this one were painted purely for the emperor's private enjoyment rather than for state record, they preserve an unusually candid, almost voyeuristic view of imperial leisure that official court chronicles never recorded.