Regarded as the first great master of Chinese painting, Gu Kaizhi worked at the Eastern Jin court in the fourth century; none of his works survives in the original. The Admonitions Scroll is a copy attributed to him and thought to date from between the sixth and eighth centuries — yet within the tradition it counts as the most reliable witness to his manner.

The scroll sets a text of behavioural instruction for court women into a sequence of pictures; as the reader opens it from right to left the scenes emerge one at a time, and none begins before the last has ended. Time flows not inside the picture but in the act of reading — a construction entirely unlike the single-frame logic of Western painting. Gu Kaizhi's line is called the silkworm thread: of even fineness throughout, unbroken, building a figure by contour and flow alone, without shadow or volume. The void is not painted; the silk itself becomes space.

In terms of art theory, Gu Kaizhi's contribution is his definition of painting's aim as *chuanshen*, transmitting the spirit: a portrait succeeds not through likeness but by catching the sitter's inner quality in the eyes and bearing. That criterion stayed at the centre of Chinese art criticism for the next fifteen hundred years and passed to Korea and Japan. The scroll was in the Qianlong Emperor's collection in the eighteenth century; it was taken to Britain during the Boxer Uprising in 1900 and is in the British Museum today. Where the work is held remains one of the live cases in the argument over the restitution of cultural property.