Exploring Fairyland

This book examines the celebrated 17th-century Ming Dynasty woodblock handscroll, Garden Scene at Huancui Hall. Created around 1600 for the merchant-scholar Wang Tingna, the print served as both a portrait of his Huizhou estate and a sophisticated tool for literati social positioning (the circle included Tang Xianzu, the Chinese Shakespeare, and Li Zhi, the renowned liberal thinker, who condemned some Confucian dogmatic principles). The narrative traces the artefact’s own journey—from its creation and loss to its modern rediscovery—while placing it within the broader revitalisation of 17th-century Chinese print culture, a transformation influenced by early contact with Western techniques. Through the lens of this single artwork, rendered as an artistic 'fairyland,' the study explores how late Ming scholars materialised their intellectual and aesthetic ideals through hybridised printing skills. Drawing on extensive fieldwork by author Dr Li Xiaofei, which involved tracing village topography and reconstructing the print's production, the book illuminates how such images were conceived, made, and disseminated.