KAIFENG — The painting 'Along the River During the Qingming Festival' is usually attributed to Zhang Zeduan of the Northern Song dynasty. The Beijing version of the Qingming scroll is widely accepted by scholars as the earliest surviving version of 'Qingming shanghe tu' and is described by the National Palace Museum in Taipei as an early 12th-century masterpiece of late Northern Song genre painting.
The scroll gives a concentrated image of 12th-century Bianjing at the height of Northern Song urban life, depicting prosperity along the Bian River in Kaifeng, then the Northern Song capital. The Bian River is portrayed not as a decorative feature but as an artery essential for feeding, supplying, taxing, and sustaining the capital city. The central section of the painting is organized around a great bridge, where a large boat is trying to pass beneath the structure as its mast is lowered and a crowd gathers in alarm.
Palace Museum researcher Yu Hui interprets the scroll as containing signs of urban anxiety, including a fire-watch tower with no proper guard, slow and negligent officials, the dangerous bridge incident, weak city defense, and commercial encroachment into public space.
The China Exploration and Research Society notes that 'Along the River During the Qingming Festival' shows the stern section of a boat with several men maneuvering a large yuloh oar. The society explains that a yuloh boat has a single sculling oar pivoting at the rear, propelled by a left-and-right or push-and-pull rhythm. Zhang Zeduan’s 12th-century scroll depicts a Chinese waterborne world in which the yaolu—a large stern oar also known as the yuloh—was already mature enough to move large river craft through narrow, crowded, bridge-filled urban canals.