Sun Wen

Sun Wen was a Qing dynasty folk painter from Fengrun, Hebei, with the courtesy name Runzhai and the sobriquet Gengyang Jushi. His life is unrecorded in painting histories and local gazetteers, and his birth and death years are unknown; public information about him is very limited. Over 36 years, from 1867 to 1903, he completed a full set of heavy-color fine-line silk paintings of Dream of the Red Chamber. The 230 surviving panels are held at the Lüshun Museum and are a Grade-One National Cultural Relic. The album presents the novel's plot and characters chapter by chapter in meticulous brushwork and rich color, offering value both for literary appreciation and as pictorial material on classical literature. It is a rare large-scale painted complete edition in the history of the novel's transmission. Three related works are held in the collection, along with painted complete editions of the Four Great Classical Novels.