The Road to Shu

This complex and meticulously painted landscape with travelers wending their way through treacherous mountain passes captures the famous Plank Road of Shu, renowned since ancient times as a treacherous route heading northward from Qinling in the northern part of China’s Sichuan province and proceeding through the Daba Mountains. A “plank road” (sandō) refers to a long, narrow trail that follows the contours of a precipitous mountainside, rather like a shelf running the length of a wall. One had no choice but to follow this dangerous road if traveling between the capital cities of Chengdu and Chang’an.

As a pictorial theme, the Plank Road of Shu offered an occasion for artistic invention in how best to depict the road twisting and turning its way through the mountains. Kinkoku solved this pictorial puzzle by leading the viewer’s eye higher and higher, visually tying the road, the travelers, and their animals together as they appear and disappear around the mountain ridges right up to the castle gate at the top of the painting. The trees have entirely dropped their leaves, and the scene is covered in white dots of falling snow, details that intensify the sense of travel along the road as a harsh, bleak, and chilling experience.

Kinkoku was a follower of Yosa Buson, and mastered Buson-style landscapes, figure paintings, and poem-paintings (haiga).