Painting : Spring Outing (游春图).

Painting : Spring Outing (游春图).

This painting is older than the rise of Islam.

Older than the Kingdom of England.

Older than every cathedral in Paris, London, or Cologne.

It has survived nearly 1,400 years of dynasties, wars, conquest, and revolution:

Emperors owned it.

A Mongol princess treasured it.

China's last emperor secretly carried it out of the Forbidden City.

Then, amid the chaos of Japan's defeat in 1945, it disappeared.

A year later, it resurfaced in Beijing's antique market.

Someone was preparing to sell it abroad. And one man sold his home to save it.

Today, it is one of the treasures of the Palace Museum in Beijing.

Its name is: Spring Outing (游春图).

The scroll measures 43 centimeters high and 80.5 centimeters wide-less than a meter across. Attributed to the Sui Dynasty painter Zhan Ziqian (展子虔), it is regarded as the earliest surviving Chinese painting associated with a named master.

So what did spring look like in China 1,400 years ago?

Unroll the painting, and the first thing that greets you is not an emperor, a battle, or some immortal realm. But a spring day.

Green mountains rise and fall across the landscape, while fresh leaves emerge from the trees and water stretches through the center of the painting.

Mist drifts between the hills and valleys, and a red temple is half-hidden among the trees (top right).

A stream winds gently downhill. To the right of a red arched bridge, a man rides a white horse, followed by two companions taking in the spring scenery along the way. Farther down, two more riders appear. One carries a long red stick, which some scholars have suggested may be a polo mallet (bottom left).

The water opens into a broad expanse. A light breeze passes over the surface, making it shimmer.

A small boat drifts across the water. Several women sit aboard, apparently deep in conversation, their enjoyment almost visible even at this tiny scale (bottom right).

On the opposite bank, two figures stand quietly admiring the flowers.

No names. No story. And yet, this painting marked an important transition in Chinese art.

Before this period, Chinese landscape painting was often relatively simple and highly stylized. Human figures could appear disproportionately large compared with the mountains around them. In Spring Outing, however, people have become small within the landscape. Mountains, water, trees, and human activity begin to belong to the same visual world.

Nature is no longer merely a backdrop. It has become the subject.

The Sui dynasty was remarkably short-lived. Its founder, Yang Jian (杨坚), had been a powerful general under the Northern Zhou (北周), a northern dynasty whose ruling elite had deep nomad roots. In 581, he ruthlessly forced the young emperor, his grandson, to abdicate and established a new empire.

Years later, Yang's armies crossed the Yangtze River and unified China. After more than two centuries of political division, China was unified once again, in 589.

Yang Jian's son, Emperor Yang of Sui (隋炀帝), or Yang Guang (杨广), was one of the most ambitious, and controversial, rulers in Chinese history.

He dramatically expanded and integrated China's canal network, linking the Yellow River, the Huai River, the Yangtze, and the waterways of the prosperous south. Grain and other goods from southern China could now be transported northward far more efficiently and at much lower cost.

Later dynasties continued to expand, repair, and depend on this north-south waterway system. Its influence on China's economic geography lasted for more than a thousand years.

The Sui also became deeply involved in the politics of East Asia. It confronted the Turks on its northern frontier and fought back against Goguryeo's invasion. Japan sent envoys to the Sui court, and Sui envoys traveled to Japan in return.

Emperor Yang also turned his attention toward the seas southeast of China.

Chinese records describe an island polity called Liuqiu (流求) that bluntly refused to acknowledge Sui authority. In 610, the emperor dispatched a military expedition to punish the defiance. After a series of battles, the Sui forces defeated the local ruler, captured several thousand people, and returned to the mainland.

The records describe Liuqiu as lying east of what is now Fujian and reachable in roughly five days by sea.

Where exactly this ancient Liuqiu was located remains debated. Traditional Chinese scholarship has often identified it with Taiwan, while other scholars have argued that it may have referred to the Ryukyu Islands.

When Sui warships were sailing toward Liuqiu in 610, Muhammad was beginning his prophetic mission in Arabia, and England did not yet exist.

This was the world in which Spring Outing was created.

But Emperor Yang's enormous military campaigns and massive canal projects placed an extraordinary burden on the population. Rebellions spread across the empire, and in 619, the Sui dynasty collapsed.

In 623, Tang dynasty defeated the rival regimes and reunified China, once again.

But here's the strange part. The Tang didn't overthrow the Sui the way a foreign conqueror would. They overthrew their own cousins.

The founder of the Tang, Li Yuan (李渊), was related to the Sui imperial family: his mother and the wife of Yang Jian were sisters. In other words, the founders of the Sui and Tang dynasties belonged to the same aristocratic family network.

What happened to Spring Outing during the Tang dynasty is unknown.

There is no surviving record of its whereabouts, and at that time collectors had not yet developed the later habit of covering paintings with ownership seals and inscriptions. For several centuries, the painting simply disappears from the historical record.

Then, in the early 12th century, it resurfaced in the collection of Emperor Huizong of Song (宋徽宗).

Huizong was a disastrous ruler, but an extraordinary artist. Few Chinese emperors were more accomplished in painting, calligraphy, and art collecting. He inscribed "Spring Outing by Zhan Ziqian" on the painting and impressed it with his imperial seals.

Then came catastrophe. In 1127, Jurchen armies from northeast China captured the Song capital of Kaifeng (开封). Emperor Huizong, almost the whole imperial family and enormous quantities of treasure were taken north as trophies.

At the time, England was still ruled by Henry I, the son of William the Conqueror, and the Second Crusade was still twenty years away.

Another of Huizong's sons, Zhao Gou (赵构), escaped capture and eventually established his regime in southern China.

And somehow, Spring Outing appears to have survived the disaster. We know this because the painting later carried the seals of Jia Sidao (贾似道), the immensely powerful, and notoriously controversial chancellor of the Southern Song in the 13th century.

By the 14th century, China was ruled by the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The painting then entered the collection of an extraordinary Mongol princess, a granddaughter of Kublai Khan (忽必烈).

She was deeply fascinated by Chinese painting and calligraphy and assembled an important collection of Chinese artworks, including Spring Outing. In the spring of 1323, the same decade Dante finished the Divine Comedy, she hosted a celebrated party of scholars and connoisseurs in Beijing.

She brought out works from her collection and invited prominent Chinese scholars and artists to examine them, compose poems, and add inscriptions. Among the paintings displayed that day was Spring Outing.

The party took place close to today's Temple of Heaven, where Trump visited this May.

During the Ming dynasty, Spring Outing passed into the collection of another notorious chancellor, Yan Song (严嵩). After Yan fell from power and his property was confiscated, the painting returned to private hands.

By the 18th century, it was owned by An Qi (安岐), the son of a wealthy salt merchant whose family was of Korean origin. From his collection, the painting eventually entered the imperial collection of the Qianlong Emperor, a descendant of the Jurchens whose armies had stormed Kaifeng six centuries earlier, but had somehow failed to carry this very scroll away.

Qianlong lived in the same era with George Washington. They died in the same year. And, during Qianlong's reign, the first American merchant ship reached China, opening direct trade between the newly independent United States and China. The relationship began on remarkably smooth and cordial terms. Chinese officials described Americans as unusually polite and professional, sometimes in striking contrast to their views of the British.

Then the imperial world itself came to an end.

The Qing dynasty collapsed in the revolution of 1911, and in 1912 the last emperor, Puyi (溥仪), abdicated at the age of six. Under the terms of his abdication, he was still allowed to live inside the Forbidden City, and the former imperial household was permitted to retain its private property.

But Puyi apparently understood that this arrangement might not last forever.

In the early 1920s, he began quietly moving some of the most valuable paintings, calligraphy, etc out of the Forbidden City, often disguising the transfers as "gifts" to his younger brother.

In 1924, Puyi was finally expelled from the Forbidden City. The treasures he had failed to remove were subsequently inventoried, and the former imperial collection eventually became part of the Palace Museum.

Puyi, however, had not given up his dream of becoming an emperor again. He turned to Japan for support. After Japan occupied Northeast China, Puyi became the puppet emperor of the Japanese-sponsored state of Manchukuo (满洲国) in the 1930s.

Spring Outing had followed him north. Then came August 1945.

As Japan surrendered and Manchukuo collapsed, Puyi fled the capital. In the chaos that followed, paintings and other treasures left behind in the palace were looted and scattered by members of his own entourage.

And once again, Spring Outing disappeared.

This was not the first time the painting had survived the fall of a dynasty.

But this time, it came dangerously close to disappearing from China forever. In 1946, the painting resurfaced in Beijing's antique market.

A collector named Zhang Boju (张伯驹) learned that it might be sold abroad. Determined to keep it in China, he negotiated the price down to 220 taels of gold (6875 grams).

To raise enough funds, he sold his luxurious Beijing courtyard residence to Fu Jen Catholic University (辅仁大学).

He had sold a home to save a painting. And afterward, Zhang joyfully gave himself a new name:

"Master of Spring Outing (春游主人)"

Although Zhang had paid an enormous price for the painting, he never intended to possess it forever. And that may be the most moving part of the entire story.

While many collectors often dream of saying: This is mine.

Zhang Boju believed almost the opposite.

His philosophy of collecting could be summed up like this:

"These treasures do not need to belong to me forever. What matters is that they stay in China, and that they survive for generations to come."

After the founding of the PRC, Zhang gradually donated many of his greatest paintings and works of calligraphy to the Palace Museum, without compensation.

Among them was Spring Outing, which is now one of the most treasured masterpieces in the collection of the Palace Museum.

But this time, it no longer belongs to an emperor. Not to a princess. Not to a chancellor. Not to a wealthy merchant or a private collector.

For more than a thousand years, each of its owners, knowingly or not, held it only for a moment before passing it on to the next. Now, it belongs to everyone.

And when we look back at that spring painted so long ago:

The riders are still crossing the bridge.

The women in the boat are still talking and laughing.

Two figures are still quietly admiring the flowers.

Fourteen hundred seasons have turned. But spring never left this painting.