“On the Baiyun heart, thousands of miles of Cangzhou interesting”, Cangzhou was a territory of the Hejian Prefecture of Zhili in the Ming Dynasty. Shen Zhou’s “Cangzhou Interesting Map” volume, with colour on paper, depicts the humorous landscape of Cangzhou, hence the name. The painting mainly shows the scenery of the south of the Yangtze River, the beautiful mountains and rivers, the vast waters, the extension of the slopes and the bushes. At the same time, it combines the majestic and majestic power of the northern peaks, and the brushwork is beautiful, which perfectly expresses the author’s interest in Cangzhou.
Shen Zhou 沈周 1427–1509, courtesy name Qi’nan (启南) and Shitian (石田), was a Chinese prominent painter in the Ming dynasty….. Shen Zhou was born into a wealthy family in Xiangcheng, near the thriving city of Suzhou, in the Jiangsu province, China. His genealogy traces his family’s wealth to the late Yuan period, but only as far as Shen’s paternal great-grandfather, Shen Liang-ch’en, who became a wealthy landowner following the dissolution of Mongol rule. After the collapse of the Yuan and the emergence of the new Ming dynasty, the position of tax collector was assigned to the head of the Shen family, under the Hongwu emperor’s new lijia system. This steadily and amply increased the family’s wealth, while freeing Shen Liang-ch’en’s male descendants from obligatory careers as Ming officials, and allowing them to live the majority of their lives as retired scholar-artists. Upon the death of his father, Shen Heng-chi, Shen Zhou decided to forgo official examinations and devote his life to the care of his widowed mother, Chang Su-wan. It is probable that he never intended to become an official, but refrained from making this obvious until his father had died. He thus renounced the life of official service while still preserving his reputation in an enduring act of filial piety. In this way, he was able to live a reclusive life, free of responsibility (except that of caring for his mother), and devote his time to artwork, socializing, and monastic contemplation of the natural world around him……
In this year’s 2020, the second decade from the turn of the century in Beijing the Capital of China also the People’s Republic of China, in which is also the year of the rat, marking its six hundred years anniversary of the Forbidden city that marks the transitional point of in between the middle of the Ming Dynasty (1368- 1644) transitionally from Nanjing to Beijing towards the Qing Dynasty (1636-1644-1911) …. The Imperial Palace seen so many countless seasonally transitional equinoxes but further its six hundred years is iconic, but it’s five hundred ninety nine years it marks it Autumn Equinox…. In which it only took twelve years to build the same of the Daming Palace of The Tang Dynasty Xian Imperial Capital only it was least twenty times larger..
