清明上河圖

Along the River During the Qingming Festival

A twelfth-century handscroll, five and a quarter metres of a city waking up. Somewhere in the crowd stands a man who does not belong to it. Find him.

尋 Begin the hunt

The traveller: a tall man in a brimmed hat and round glasses, with a bedroll on his back and a spear in his right hand — **The Traveller**Hat · glasses · spear

The whole scroll, reduced to a single band

The entire scroll · 38 414 pixels wide · he is in here somewhere

The traveller as drawn — **As drawn**What to look for

The traveller as he appears hidden in the painting — **As hidden**What you will see

What you are looking for

A tall man in a brimmed hat and round glasses, a bedroll on his back and a spear in his right hand. He stands upright while the people around him stoop over their work.

In the painting he does not look like that. He has been redrawn in the scroll's own hand — ochre ink on aged silk, the weave showing through him, his contours pitched to exactly the darkness of the porters beside him. He is not a bright cartoon pasted onto a brown picture.

What gives him away is posture and height: he stands a head above the Song adults around him, upright among stooped figures. That is the whole of your advantage.

畫The painting

Along the River During the Qingming Festival is attributed to Zhang Zeduan (張擇端), painted in the Northern Song around the turn of the twelfth century. It is ink and light colour on silk, 24.8 cm tall and 528 cm long, and it lives in the Palace Museum in Beijing.

It is not a landscape with people in it. It is a survey of labour: boatmen hauling against the current, a bridge crowded to the point of argument, porters, vendors, a camel train leaving by the gate. Something like eight hundred figures, none of them heroic, all of them busy. The painting's subject is a working city, and its method is to refuse a focal point.

Two paintings, routinely confused. In 1736 a team of Qing court painters produced a much larger remake — longer, brighter, more crowded, now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Reproductions of the two get swapped constantly. This game uses the Song original: you can tell by the palette, which is almost monochrome amber with no saturated pigment anywhere, and by the proportions, which are roughly 21:1 rather than the Qing version's 32:1.

卷Why a handscroll

A handscroll was never meant to be seen at once. You held it closed in your left hand, unrolled an arm's length with your right, looked, then wound the seen part away to reveal the next. The format has a reading direction and a pace, and it withholds — you cannot check the end without travelling there.

Which is to say a handscroll is already a search: a long space you move through a window at a time, unable to hold all of it in view. Putting a hidden figure in one does not impose a game on the painting so much as make explicit something the format was always doing. The viewer here keeps that constraint — you pan, you zoom, you lose your place.

數The figures

Painted: c. 1100Northern Song
Silk: 528 cm× 24.8 cm
Scan: 38 414 px× 1 800 px
Tiles: 192048 px wide
Delivered: 16 MBAVIF
Waldos: 1hidden once

法How to hunt

dragPan along the scroll. Scroll wheel moves you sideways too.

⌘ ＋ wheelZoom in and out at the cursor.

KShow the quarry — who you are looking for.

MThe magnifying glass, for reading a crowd closely.

HA hint. Three available, thirty seconds on the clock each.

←　→Step a screen at a time, or a section at a time in Section mode.

0Reset the view if you lose yourself.

clickWhen you have him. The clock starts on your first guess.