How to estimate the number of people on the riverside map at Qingming Festival?

Zhang Zeduan's The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival is one of the top ten famous paintings handed down in China, which has high historical value and artistic level. However, there are different opinions about the number of people in the painting.

Due to the large number of people and different sizes on the Qingming Riverside Map, it is difficult to make accurate statistics. Therefore, how many people are painted in each book varies greatly. It has always been thought that the Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival has more than 500 characters, more than 50 livestock, more than 20 boats, cars and sedan chairs.

However, after an old gentleman got a copy of this painting, he accurately counted the characters on the painting and found that there were 8 15 people on the riverside scene at Qingming Festival. The original statement was too wrong. His statistical method was to put a grain of rice on everyone in the picture. After all set, count how many grains of rice there are. He counted several times, and 8 15 was his final answer.

On the other hand, the Riverside Map on the Qingming Festival is divided into two parts, one is the countryside and the other is the market. There are 8 14 people, more than 60 livestock, 28 ships, more than 30 buildings, 20 cars, 8 cars and more than 70 trees/kloc-0. There is another saying, according to the statistics of Zhuotang Culture Volume 8 written by Kenji Saito, there are 1643 people and 208 animals on the painting. No one knows how many people are there on the riverside at Qingming Festival.

Why don't you know the number of people in an existing famous painting? I believe many people have this question. That's because the Riverside Map on Qingming Festival is 24.8 cm wide and 528.7 cm long, and it is huge, including people from all walks of life, including handyman, juggler, actor, beggar, almsgiving monk, fortune teller, spiritual practitioner, innkeeper, teacher, miller, ironworker, carpenter, mason and scholar.

The figures in the painting are shoulder to shoulder and there are a sea of people. It's hard to count. There are still many people in the painting who are not plump, only "busts" exist, and some even have a pair of feet. In addition, some bearers are carrying sedan chairs. Does the person in the sedan chair count as the person in The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival? If this person does not appear in the picture, if not, then there is a person in the sedan chair, and it is impossible to count.

There are many situations like this in the painting, and there are many reasons why the characters in the painting are very different. For example, the Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival has many replicas, the most famous of which is the replica collected by the Palace Museum in Taiwan. This is the work of five painters in the Qing Palace Painting Academy in the first year of Qianlong.

Now we still don't know how many people are in the painting, but people should pay attention to the artistic characteristics and historical value of the painting, which explains why the Palace Museum doesn't announce how many people are there.