While China's famous ceramics were produced by nameless craftsmen, with painting and calligraphy we enter the realm of the amateur whose name has survived and who was often scholar, official, poet or all three. It has been said that the four great treasures of Chinese painting are the brush, the ink, the inkstone and the paper or silk. The earliest brush found, from about 400 BC, is made out of animal hairs glued to a hollow bamboo tube. Ink was made from pine soot mixed with glue and hardened into a stick which would be rubbed with water on an inkstone made of non-porous, carved and decorated slate. Silk was used for painting as early as the third century BC and paper was invented by Cai Lun in 106 AD. The first known painting on silk was found in a Han tomb; records show that there was a great deal of such painting but in 190 AD the vast imperial collection was destroyed in a civil war - the soldiers used the silk to make tents and knapsacks. All we know of Han painting comes from decorated tiles, lacquer, painted pottery and a few painted tombs, enough to show a great sense of movement and energy. There is a scroll in ink and colour on silk attributed to Gu Kaizhi about 400 AD and entitled Admonitions of the Instructress to Court Ladies, in the British Museum, and we know that the theory of painting was already being discussed, as the treatise The Six Principles of Painting dates from about 500 AD.

The Sui-Tang period, with a powerful stable empire and a brilliant court, was exactly the place for painting to develop, and a great tradition of figure painting grew up, especially of court subjects - portraits, pictures of the emperor receiving envoys and of court ladies, several of which are to be seen in Beijing. Although only a few of these survived, the walls of Tang tombs, such as those near Xi'an, are rich in vivid frescoes which provide a realistic portrayal of court life. Wang Wei in the mid-eighth century was an early exponent of monochrome landscape painting, but the great flowering of landscape painting came with the Song dynasty . An academy was set up under imperial patronage and different schools of painting emerged which analyzed the natural world with great concentration and intensity; their style has set a mark on Chinese landscape painting ever since. There was also lively figure painting - a famous horizontal scroll in Beijing showing the Qing Ming River Festival is the epitome of this. The last emperor of the Northern Song, Hui Zong , was himself a painter of some note, which indicates the status of painting in China at the time. The Southern Song preferred a more intimate style and such subjects as flowers, birds and still life grew in popularity.

Under the Mongols there were many officials who found themselves unwanted or unwilling to serve the alien Yuan dynasty and who preferred to retire and paint. This produced the "literati" school , with many painters harking back to the styles of the tenth century. One of the great masters was Ni Can . He, among many others, also devoted himself to the ink paintings of bamboo which became important at this time. In this school, of which there are many extant examples, the highest skills of techniques and composition were applied to the simplest of subjects, as also with the paintings of plum flowers. Both of these continued to be employed by painters of the next three or more centuries. From the Yuan onwards a tremendous quantity of paintings has survived. Under the Ming dynasty there was a great interest in collecting the works of previous ages and a linked willingness by painters to be influenced by tradition. There are plenty of examples of bamboo and plum blossom, and bird and flower paintings being brought to a high decorative pitch, as well as a number of schools of landscape painting firmly rooted in traditional techniques. The arrival of the Manchu Qing dynasty did not disrupt the continuity of Chinese painting, but the art became wide open to many influences. It included the Italian Castiglione (Lang Shi-ning in Chinese) who specialized in horses, dogs and flowers under imperial patronage, the Four Wangs who re-interpreted Song and Yuan styles in an orthodox manner, and the individualists such as the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou and some Buddhist monks who objected to derivative art and sought a more distinctive approach to subject and style. But on the whole, the weight of tradition was powerful enough to maintain the old approach.