A future-proof view of past glories

He says that the painting was unrolled under the supervision of experts of the Palace Museum, who were ready to make repairs if needed.

"To our relief and surprise, the colors were intact. The brilliance of it took our breath away," he adds.

Now, people in Beijing can share this same feeling of awe, as a digital replica of the artwork, twice the size of the original piece, is on show at the National Museum of China.

This reproduction is one of the highlights of Compilation of Classics in the Flourishing Age, a long-term exhibition that forms part of an ambitious project — the book A Comprehensive Collection of Ancient Chinese Paintings — that has taken Wang Xiaosong and his team some 17 years to accomplish.

When they visited the Palace Museum to digitalize Wang Ximeng's masterpiece, the group's members were on the verge of completing the compilation of a whole collection of Songera paintings, a process that had begun in 2005.

And yet, it proved to be just the first few steps of a much longer march. In the years that followed, the publication project extended to encompass a much wider scope that included paintings from the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, as well as paintings dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and earlier.

The final collection of 60 volumes catalogs over 12,400 classic paintings, made primarily on paper, silk or linen, which are in the collections of 263 museums, galleries and other cultural institutions both in China and around the world. This massive collection of works was unveiled to the public in March at an exhibition at the Zhejiang Art Museum in Hangzhou.

The ongoing exhibition at the National Museum of China shows high-fidelity prints and digital images of over 1,700 works featured in A Comprehensive Collection of Ancient Chinese Paintings.

Visitors will first enter an area where the volumes are on display for them to flip through. Then they will be ushered on a journey through time, in a space of some 6,000 square meters. They are to attend an unprecedented gathering of some of the greatest Chinese artworks in history, for example, Court Ladies Wearing Flowered Headdresses (Zanhua Shi-nyu Tu) by Tang-era painter Zhou Fang and currently part of Liaoning Provincial Museum's collection, and Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Fuchun Shanju Tu), a legendary piece by Yuan-era artist Huang Gongwang that was torn in two, the pieces of which are now respectively part of the collections of Zhejiang Provincial Museum and the Palace Museum in Taipei.