The Garden Perished, but the Paintings Survived: The Functional Reconfiguration of the Moli Wang Lineage’s Hezhou Tu 壑舟图 and the Sacralization of Lineage Landscape

This article examines two albums entitled Hezhou Tu (Paintings of the Boat in the Ravine), painted by Shen Zhou and Jiang Wenzao for Wang Pan of the Moli Wang lineage. Drawing on the paintings, inscriptions, and lineage records, it traces how images of a garden retreat were transformed from gifts exchanged among literati into media for commemorating ancestors. The pictorial and literary corpus originated in Wang Ao’s 1487 Record of the Boat in the Ravine. It invoked the classical allusion to a boat used for crossing a great river to construct the garden owner’s identity as a lofty recluse, while debating the Zhuangzi’s parable of concealing a boat and its account of transformation. In the late Ming, the garden changed hands and the albums left the Wang family. Qing descendants repurchased them, transferred the garden name and an ancestral inscription to a new site, and eventually converted the new garden into an ancestral shrine. Later records of viewing the paintings after Qingming grave visits further connect the albums with ancestral remembrance. We argue that allusive interpretation, spatial substitution, and ritualized viewing jointly reconfigured the albums’ functions. The decisive shift was from preserving the physical garden to sustaining a meaningful nexus among its name, images, shrine, and genealogy. Successive inscriptions, remountings, and derivative works enabled lineage memory to be continually compiled, while repurchase became, in Wang accounts, the crucial moment at which ties to the ancestors were restored. The case shows how landscape, both painted and physical, could become a constitutive medium of lineage sacralization by representing an ancestor’s dwelling place and carrying memories of his virtue.