It was a belief in ancient China that the reign of a really virtuous sovereign would be blessed with the appearance, sent by the Heaven (god), of various auspicious symbols such as the fêng-huang (phoenix), lung (dragon), ch'-lin (unicorn), pai-hu (white tiger) and so on. Illustrated descriptions of these symbols were called shui-ying. (auspicious responses) paintings. The appearance of any one of these had to be reported, immediately if the kind of it required, to the imperial court. No exaggeration or modification was allowed. A false report was subject to punishment. For identification of the symbols, the shui-ying painting was the only source of information. Paintings of this sort, therefore, were things of utility. It seems that shui-ying paintings began to be made in scroll form around the end of the Former Han Dynasty (around the beginning of the Christian era). Editions in as many as eight or eleven scrolls were made during the Six Dynasties. Those by Sun Jou-chih and by Hsiung Li were widely known among them. However, works of this kind, together with books of astrology, yin-yang (fortune-telling) and such-like, were listed as “prohibited books” by successive dynasties of later periods, and the mass of them were lost in the Sui Dynasty. The scroll discussed here is No.2683 of Paul Pelliot's Tun-huang Manuscripts in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. The writer, Mr. Matsumoto, considers it to be a copy, made around the end of the T'ang Dynasty (ca. 9 th century), of a shui--ying scroll of the Six Dynasties. He discusses that its contents, after comparison with various ancient manuscripts, are very much similar to those of the shui-ying by Sun Jou-chih, and that it contains some other elements derived from even older versions. He refers also to its characteristics as a piece of scroll-form painting, its style of description manifesting the tradition of old Chinese painting, and its unique position and significance in T'ang art.
