Lighting Incense at Miaofeng Mountain (detail)
妙峰山進香圖 Late Qing Dynasty
This is a detail from a much larger painting of pilgrims processing toward a temple on Miaofeng Mountain, just north of Beijing. It depicts a pair of musicians engaged in a performance of shuochang 說唱, or musical storytelling, surrounded by a small circle of onlookers. There were hundreds of genres of shuochang in China during the eighteenth century, and some are still performed today.
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